Trying to troubleshoot hardware in unstable system, going insane here!!!

[PsyNinja]

Ok, heres a bit of background
I had an Athlon 700 on an abit Ka7 mobo with 128 megs crucial cas2 pc133 and a radeon 32ddr
I installed winME over win98SE and it ran fine for quite a while (3+ months)
I then got a duron 750 and an Abit KT7A-Raid, installed them fine, and ran the CPU at 980mhz (140*7) at 1.85 volts
I had my Maxtor 45gig on the raid controller and my plextor12x burner and DVD drive on the standard controller.
everything worked great for another month and then I started getting LOTS of BSOD's, Locks, and registry errors, I took everything back down to defaults, memory at 100mhz, default voltage. still same frequency ofcrashes and locks.
I then reformatted and reinstalled ME fresh, and this time it would not even load all the way, dfdhelp would always stop reponding and lock the system hard.
I then formatted and installed win2k, and it installed fine, but would lock and did not let me install ANY programs, they would all give very strange errors.
I then used the maxtor diagnostic utility and did a complete check of the drive after moving it to the standard IDE controller on the mobo and after the diag. came out fine I did a low level format and reinstalled win2k.
I am now at this point and windows will lock hard EVERY night, regardless of the conditions, and sometimes will lock during the day.
At this point I dont think its the HD, and I am trying to decide between the mobo, cpu, and ram, though I have used a diagnostic program called Quicktech to test the Ram and cpu. the program loads a unix kernel from a floppy to access many different diagnostic and stress test options.
At this point I am really stuck and am not sure what to do next. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[esung]

It's unlikely that your CPU is at fault.. It could be either RAM or MB. maybe you can get some RAM testing software and check your memory out.

 

[WhackJob]

Any chance that there is a heat issue here? You've put everything back to defaults, and its still locking up, youve reinstalled and had lock ups as its installing. That eliminates any driver issues, so its gotta be hardware or bios at this point. My suggestion is 1st, check for the latest bios revision. 2.Set everything to default in bios, not just the cpu voltage, if you havent already. Pull everything out you can, like the burner. Just have the bare minimum in there, vid card, ram, cpu, and a cdrom. Try to load your OS again. If it locks up, then you know its the cpu or ram. By chance can you post the BSOD error message? That would help to identify the culprit. Good luck....

 

[piercedan]

WhackJob is right, reset everything to defaults and pull all devices, ie sound, modem, and anything else not necessary for booting. Only load the OS and the chipset drivers. Then load the video. NO SOFTWARE! If this setup doesn't crash, add the sound card and the drivers for it. If it is fine, go to the modem. Make sure you give sufficient time between devices to ensure they aren't the culprit.

Hope this helps!