need tips for troubleshooting winxp freezing

[idea]

fresh install of winxp, on a machine that uses all my old parts (tested stable) except for a new mobo, cpu+hsf, and 3 ram sticks. system freezes on high cpu load. memory is tested good with a memtest bootdisk. temps are better than average, the system is not overheating. here are specs...

athlon 1ghz, 44c high load
abit kt7 latest bios
512mb ram, tested all good
agp 16mb diamond stealth2 (may this be the problem? this is my loyal video card for years now)

sblive!, 2 maxtor hdds, liteon cdrw, floppy, 3com nic

 

[RemyCanad]

I would first pull everything. Then one by one put them in and start it up to see what happens.

I had a Stealth III that under high load would lockup. I am guessing it was heat but I don't know.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Since you're using 3 sticks with the KT7 did you increase the RAS precharge timing in the bios? I know it passed memtest86 but despite that your symptom reflects what I've encountered on that board in combo with 3 sticks present. The irony is I had almost that exact setup but with the stealthIII and no burner@the time My vid never locked up even though I had it jumped for 4x, in fact the system was highly stable once the RAS precharge was set to 1 nanosec.

 

[idea]

problem fixed. it was video card. winxp is awesome, if i just waited another 10 secs after the freeze-ups, it would've disabled the card and told me something was wrong with it. i actually forgot to install the proper drivers from s3, rather than the ones that came with winxp. that was the problem all along.

 

[RemyCanad]

Great to know you got it fixed.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

*Mr Burns*excellent! BTW I was using some tweaked bit flip drivers some guy wrote for my card that I found with a google search, if you look around you may find better drivers than the what you have now.