cold-boot problems and crashing - please help!

[FergCu]

Hi everyone,
have kind of posted about this before, but still having no luck.

My g/f's computer is having a few problems. Unfortunately all her university deadlines are 6 weeks away, so she cant really afford to be having problems right now!!

anyway, essentially most mornings when she turns on the computer, it will freeze at POST. This will be one of three things.
1) The power LED comes on and the Fans spin up to their maximum speed (normally they slow down after a second). Nothing else happens. dont think there is even a PC speaker beep.
2) I get through the memory and devices test, and then it pauses with a message similar to "overclocking failed due something or other...press f1 to go to setup, or f2 to load default values".
3) It gets to the usb hard drive device detection and hangs. This only happens when an external USB drive is plugged in.

Also, the computer sometimes randomly crashes and just hangs which is the most frustrating part - lost work. This can happen at any time... when typing in word, using adobe illustrator, photoshop, browsing web etc etc.

Temps seem normal (although will double check). Ran memtest86+ for 9.5 hours yesterday with no problem. It's not overclocked either.

Any thoughts would be unbelievably appreciated.

specs are:
Asus A8S-X
AMD64 3200 (venice core i think)
2 x 512mb ram sticks (although not matched)
Sapphire ATI x800gt (r243?)
2 x PATA hard drives
2 x PATA optical
1 x floppy
1 x USB external HD
400W Akasa PSU

Windows XP SP2

many thanks

Ferg

 

[FergCu]

Hey dutch, thanks for these thoughts.
Will try the major ones in a few weeks... unfortunately theyre all a bit hardcore and risky to be trying so close to her final year hand-in!

As for the others:
CMOS battery. Have had the board for about 4 months. Is it likely that it could be dead already do you think? Regarding CMOS, did a reset about a month ago, to no avail.
Anything changed. Nope! It was a new build, utilising the ram, optical and hard drives from the old computer, but everything else is new.
Thats triggered a memory though - when i built the computer, the motherboard kept blowing....I got through 2 before i realised that it was because there was a sneaky mounting post shorting something out and destroying the board. (luckily i had bought the board through a rival company, so it was them and not OcUK that had to replace it ahahahhahahaaa <evil laugh>). Anyway, do you think its possible that it might have affected any of the components (for instance the PSU)?

Cheers for your thoughts,

ferg

 

[FergCu]

bump

anyone else have any thoughts? As I said, I'll try Dutch's sugggestions in a few weeks, but was wondering if anyone else had a thought or two?

thanks,
Ferg