daricanprotege5

ok my dad upgraded his pc, heres the parts he got..
MB ASUS P4S533-VM
Intel P4/2.4BGHz 533M
DDR 256MB|32X64 PC-2700
350 watts power supply

installed XP as the O/S. what happens is while loading paltalk a chatting program and AOL the computer reboots by itself. also closing the IE windows lags and sometimes freezes them. i'm leaning more towards an O/S problem then hardware problem. anyone have any suggestions or run into the same problem???

heres the whole process that i did last night, started off trying to install XP with an additional HD and Cdrom.. kept getting some I/O error during install. so put win2k on did a quick format and tried installing win2k got another I/O error. so i turned the machine off unplugged the additional cdrom and HD which are like 3 or 4 yrs old. so unplugged them and tried xp again. went through setup but didnt do a format installed normal. everything installed ok. the only thing i can think of is that some win2k files might have stayed on and are causing conflicts.... it was 3am and needed to be at work at 7am thats why everything was installed so sluppy, learned a lesson from that, TAKE YOUR TIME..

SEA_P5

Do you have any other items hooked up to the computer (scanner, printer, digi-cam, etc.)? With WinXP, if the OS can not find a specific driver to run the attached accessories it crashes....it did this several times when I had my wireless usb network pod.

I also would check out the bios to see if everything is set correctly. Check out the processor speed and make sure that it is set properly and that the boot sequence is set up to read the cd-rom first then hard-drive.

Hopefully this helps you out a little.

Also if you run into a problem where your computer reboots when you are admist working on a project and it does this sporadically, that means you need a stronger powersource...I currently have a 430 watt in my computer and my brother has a 550 watt.