10 months old computer and severely screwed

[Wamingo]

prepare for a lengthy one...

for about 10 months or so this system has been running virtually flawless... but... nothing seems to last forever eh...

About 2 weeks ago, my win2k started crashing all the time. Lots of memory address references in bluescreens etc.. and it just got worse and worse... Then it wouldn't boot properly anymore. formatted the drive and reinstalled and after a couple of good startups it wouldn't boot at all!... now I can't even reinstall anymore!!!
It errors out or freezes Before it even starts writing to disk during install... I assume it only writes to memory during the initial part, so I think the drives are fine... and besides I did run drive tests and it found nothing it couldn't fix and no bad sectors.

I have 98 too on the same 45gb disk... which pretty much behaved and ended up just like 2k... and now it will boot for the most part but explorer or other critical system files crashes usually immediately and reboot is required (or forced)...

I figure, well it's probably the memory that is dying because of the countless bluescreens that said it could not write to or read from xx address... so I bought a small 128mb stick and took the old one out... but it behaves exactly the same in any combination...

then I noticed during my countless reboots that it didn't boot up every time! the monitor just kept blinking and never turns on... sometimes it takes me as many as 8 times pressing the reset button before the monitor turns on...
aha, it was probably my powersuply that was dying then right? So today I bought a new one, a wooping 430watts Antec Truepower psu... but that wasn't it... 2k still won't reinstall and it takes just as many reboots if not more to get a screen...

I've also tried changing the gfx card out with an old pci one, unplugging the cdrom drives and the soundcard... none of it made it any different.
I think the only thing I haven't tried yet is unplugging the network card and hd's... but I don't think they're the cause of the trouble...

I don't really have any spare cpu's, mobo's or hd's to try so I'm gonna have to spend money it seems...

alas, I'm at a loss...
I suspect it's my mobo now, but I've already made two mistakes and I think I'd like someone to help me make up the next decision...
so what do You think?

ask away as you please...

thanks


edit: just correcting some silly spelling errors and...
perhaps I should tell everyone what system I have (doh... sorry)...

cpu: Amd XP1800+
mobo: MSI K7T266 Pro2
ram: Kingston PC2100 512 + 128 mb
gfx: Hercules geforce 2 GTS (32mb)
sfx: Creative Audigy (bulk)
hd: IBM 18 + 45 GB
cdr: a 1 year old Plextor burner + a many year old HP burner
psu: Antec 430watt Truepower
network card: realtek unknown

Aside from dust I think that's everything.

 

[copyfixer]

Just a thought, whenever I go through the trouble of redoing a hard drive, I always write the drive to zeroes first. This gives you a totally clean slate to work with. If you search IBM.com , you can find two programs wipe and zap to do this for you. My other suggestion would be to take another hard drive and try it before I invested in a mother board. good luck.

 

[Wamingo]

well I tried one I forgot I had, an 8gb with already installed win2k and mandrake-linux, neither ever booted up, it freezes random places or bluescreens with win2k during boot.
Also I took out the floppy drive and the network card and it made no difference either...
reset cmos a few times too...
but it's exactly the same as before...
when I start up the computer from a cold computer it starts up fine, but sometimes it reboots automatically around the time it's about to find IDE stuff, but not at the same spot every time, give or take a few second.
When I use the reset button it mostly doesn't reset, it just goes black, and I have to press the reset button several times although the fans are still spinning like they should, but it doesn't sound like it gets to the IDE identification at all, just dead. It's not the monitor because I tried another monitor too.

so... mobo? or cpu?
they look fine, I can't see any bent pins or burn marks...

someone please help me decide

ps: All the hardware that I've changed for others (except ram/cpu) works fine in my old dual 500MHz pentium3 - which I'm using to write this right now.