Random reboots new system upgrade Xp

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30 Nov 2008
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Hi, recently upgraded a p4@3Ghz it was a Philips MT1100 rebuild from pcworld not the best I know. It had a rubbish maxtor harddrive that would constantly click away and take forever to boot, so i upgraded it with a WDBlue-320GB sata and 2GB of Crucial Dual Ram and a powercolour 512MB X1600 Graphics for good measure. Switched it on and loaded the xp install disk, first thing I noticed it was having issues with the disk loading drivers I reinserted it and tried a few other copys I had as well. But the same old cannot copy came up, anyway I finally got it to install, but after that I found the system was very unstable fast but randomly rebooting. I tested the ram and sure enough it reported this error. I took the ram back thinking it was faulty. stuck the old ram back in and it worked fine. I got the new ram and inserted that and it failed again working for a long period of time but rebooting after say watching a film for 30mins it would give up. I have tested it using memtest and prime95 and windows memory checks:confused: all bring up the same error."hardware Failure". today i reinserted the old ram and not even that is working anymore that brings up hardware failure too. Im not sure what the problem is it cant be the ram as i have tried 2 brand new set pairs and they failed. The ram is the correct type for the board and i was expecting an easy upgrade. i have tried the timings which on default were
2.5T-6-3-3 and tried 3.0T 8-3-3 that worked also but save old error came up. I dare not try anymore timings as anything else seems to send the system to death almost. had to clear the cmos which i dont want to repeat.

I have tried every combination of swapping the ram around to test the slots and they all come up with the same result??

spec is

P4 preston 3Ghz some random MB not listed Model SIS-661
2GB Crucial basic ddr400 Ram
WD 320GB Blue
300watt PSU looks like a £10 Cheap job
and a powercolor X1600 Graphics by Ati
 
The Voltage cant be changed, Its set on 2.6v. As for the psu, it could well be. But im not sure, the computer stayed on all day and didnt fault at all, but memtest is still bring up errors. I havnt yet seen it reboot as its my dad's pc so im not around to see it happen. I played a long video for about an hour and it didnt crash at all so im not sure if it would be the psu or not? it tends to reboot when using photo software and streaming tv anything heavy on resources. Thing is I got to try and get hold of a psu to test it with. :( If it were up to me I would have scrapped the damn thing and built a new one. Would have been so much easier :)
 
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