Serious Computer Problems

[NeedHelpPLEASE]

Yesterday, I began to receive serious slow downs in my computers performance. It suddenly began to crash randomly without any error message, just crashes. I thought it was a virus, and run Mcaffee, with an updated list and it came clean. Ofcourse,I had to run the virus scan several times because my system kept crashing. I tried formatting and reinstalling Win2k and at the start, it seemed to be running fine, until the sudden freezing back again. So, I decided to format AGAIN, and install Win95. I left my second partition unformatted, because there are files I dont want to loose, however, I doubt a virus is being executed from that harddrive - Im not even running anything off of that partition. Once Win95 was installed, after installing some software, it began to freeze again and right now its at the point where it freezes right when I boot. I believe it is a hardware problem and the software doesn't seem to crash. I have my computer open but I am not sure what to look for. Everything seems intact. And maybe something is fubar in the BIOS? Please, I need desperate help.
I have a p3 550 (not overclocked),256pc133 ram, an ibm HD, an asus geforce card, creative soundblaster, adaptec lan card, abit mobo, yamaha CDRW and a toshiba dvdrom. I can give more specific hardware information if needed.

 

[Vegito]

What kind of case do you have ? Is your heatink & fan still running.. it sounds like a heat problem.. if your fan is still working it might be something else... Try using ghost to make a image, save it and reinstall, if everything works, then it's something else, if not you can always restore the image..

 

[NeedHelpPLEASE]

Its an Inwin q500 case. I checked the heatsink and it seemed to be intact. I also checked the PcHealthStatus in my bios and it said the system was running at 23 degrees celcius, while the CPU was running at 40 celcius. I dont know what making an image of the stuff on the HD will accomplish when I can barely stay in my OS for more than a few minutes.

 

[NeedHelpPLEASE]

Dunno if this can have any relation, but there was smoke in the room the same night caused by a log falling out of a fireplace . I cant see any relation but something might of happened?