Soyo 7IS2 PC Randomly Freezes

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Last January I built an inexpensive PC for my sister:

Soyo SY-7IS2 board
1100 Mhz Celeron (Coppermine)
30 GB Maxtor 7200 rpm
512 MB PC133 ValueRam
Liteon CD-ROM
48x Verbatim CDRW
Nvidia TNT2 Ultra 32MB PCI
SoundBlaster Live Value
Belkin/Realtek NIC
Win XP Home

Up until three weeks ago, it had been performing flawlessly. She was surfing the web & the PC locked/froze up. She had to press the reset but to reboot. Unfortunately, from that moment on her PC locks up randomly. It locks up during the BIOS, during Windows disk error check, Windows loading & if it manages to load successfully, within seconds of starting to web surf or using an app like Word. Only pressing the reset button will unfreeze it.

She did not change or install any new hardware or software on this PC before the problem started.

I have tried numerous methods of troubleshooting without success:

1. Various RAM configurations including using sticks from my PC.
2. Removing the Soundcard & NIC.
3. Swapping in a different power supply.
4. Changing the IDE ribbon cable.
5. Unplugging the optical mouse & just using the keyboard.
6. Disconnecting the CD drives.
7. Clearing the CMOS.

I looked at Windows Event Viewer and there are no errors reported. The CPU has a good copper heatsink & fan (using Arctic Silver) & I am certain it's not a temp problem. The lock ups always occur during boot up are within seconds or a few minutes of boot up.

I am pretty sure it's harware related...There are only three components I haven't checked yet:
1. Motherboard
2. Hard drive
3. Video card

I have an old Seagate 3GB drive I am planning to try, & I have an old ATI 16MB Rage card I can install.

I am leaning towards a bad motherboard...Any ideas or suggestions?

Please help.

Dave

 

[lobadobadingdong]

what about cooling, did you confirm the cpu and ps fans are spinning fine? did you check the fins on the hs for massive amounts of dust. you might also try re-seating the processor and re-applying thermal compound as well as re-seating the memory and video card. also when you get it into safe mode go into the system properties and under Advanced > Start up and Recovery, uncheck the box to restart windows on error, and you can see if there is a bsod.

if you suspect the hard drive, get the manufacturers utilities to test it out, although it sounds more like a heat and/or general system stability issue than a software/hdd issue.