Im dealing with a 1.3ghz p4 w/640mb of ram ibm deskstar 40 gig hd sony 16x dvd burner with 48x cd burner and sound blaster live.... helping a friend. the thing locks up alot, no real rime or reason. formatted the hard drive and b4 i could get windows installed it locked up. seams that when the cd or dvd are running it locks up the most. dvd brand new. problem real old. any suggestions...

Hi mrdliberato, welcome to SAF

Sounds like a hardware issue to me, probably some overheating or a bad RAM stick (this is the most probable)...

You may try to test it using Memtest, from http://www.memtest86.com/ (it runs in DOS mode, as you wasn't able to reinstall Windows).

Let it perform check for some hours (all day or night long if possible). Any error during this test and you'll need to replace the ram stick.

Chris