A slow and painful death

[EtillaTheOne]

Athlon XP 1800+
Abit NV7-133R nForce
2 x Crucial 256MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM
MSI Geforce 4 Ti4200 128MB
Maxtor 40GB 7200RPM
Windows XP

I bought the system last week. It worked fine for a couple of days, then out of nowhere medal of honor started to freeze. After restarting and entering the game the sound disappeared. After restarting again and running into the freezing problem (this time on the EA logo at the beginning), I tried the serious sam demo and it froze at the title screen. Then I restarted and tried spider solitaire and it was loading ultra slow, as was volume control and any other simple window I opened. So I decided to shut down and leave the pc for a minute before rebooting.

I got to the loading windows xp screen, but when it should have entered windows the screen just went black. Restart twice with the same result. I haven't updated any drivers (no internet access until I move in to res next week) but don't see how old drivers could be the source of the problem, after all it worked fine for the first three days.

Any thoughts?

 

[wnied]

This is kinda a longshot, but I would look into the cooling of the CPU. Sounds to me that you may have burned out a fan or maybe your Heatsink isnt connected completely to the chip. Also check your videocard and see how hot that is. Could be you burned something up on that. I had similiar problems with an XP Athlon I put together for someone when the CPU heatsink wouldnt lay flat on the chip surface. ended up being a poorly made unlevel heatsink, that almost burned out a $1600 system.

Hope this helps ya.
~wnied~