Hello People,
I recently built a system for myself to replace a very old Dell I was running. I went with a MSI PM8M 478-Socket MicroATX board (big mistake going 478. . .realized that two weeks later), Intel Pentium 4 2.8ghz, a Western Digital 80gb Caviar hard drive, 512mb Kingston ValueRAM, XFX GEForce 6200. The system, as "budget" as it is, has run pretty well - but what was a small and infrequent problem since the birth of this computer a month ago has grown into a crippling illness.
The computer freezes. It started slowly, a once in a while sort of deal. Now it freezes every 10-15 minutes and sometimes even before I get past the Windows loading screen. It also freezes in Safe Mode, which leads me to believe I have a hardware issue. Here's what I've done so far:
Replaced the hard drive with a known working hard drive. Freezes persisted.
Switched out the stick of RAM with known working RAM. Also ran MemTest86 on existing stick - no errors. Freezes persisted.
Ran Norton AV, Spybot, Adaware, TrojanHunter, etc. . .some small issues found. Again freezes persisted.
The only other two hardware components I can imagine to be at the root of my headache are the power supply and the processor.
My question is this: since I don't have an extra of either lying around here how can I best figure out whether it is one of these two components? Any light that anybody can shed on my problem will be vastly appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
-Mike