Clearly something wrong that i cant figure out. Help Apreciated

The computer i built probably a year and a half ago now has just recently been freezing like crazy. I have no idea why. First it would freeze like once or twice a day and now its up to about every 15ish mins that your on it. Its getting ridiculious and its not able to do anything serious on it cause it will freeze in the middle. I wouldn't be suprised if it does before i post this.

I scanned with a-squared, spy-ware S&D, AVG, and ad-aware and nothing out of the normal (tracking cookies and what not) and did a free mcafee scan and it found nothing.

Its an AMD 64 3000+ with 2 harddrives one 80 and one 120. All windows and program on one and music and whatnot on the other.

-AMD 64 3000+
-Radion 9800 pro 256 card
-2 hardrives one IDE and one the other thing i completly forget most everything computer related since i lost interest awhile back
-Gigabite MOBO. A nice one
-Windows XP home no service pack 2 i believe

Anyone know what it could possibly be? I cannot find anything wrong, but there clearly is.

 

since it seems to be happeneind more and more frequently, two things come to mind: overheating, or a dying peice of hardware.

are you getting a Blue Screen? if so, whats the error message on it?

some things to troubleshoot:

Try taking out all components and re-seating them, including RAM, Video card, any other cards, and IDE cables.

check temperatures. after the computer has been used, restart, enter the BIOS, and check the hardware monitoring section-- or use a Windows based utility to detect the motherboard sensors, like MBM http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=311

CPU should be under 50 C ideally. If its warmer, you may need to take of the heatisnk and re-apply thermal paste, and/or be sure your system has adequate cooling.

If you are running more than 1 stick of RAM, try running only 1 at a time, and alternating, this can rule out bad RAM. Also consider running Memtest http://www.majorgeeks.com/Memtest86_d4226.html

Let us know how the progress goes.

 

Progress so far.

- Completly cleaned out inside. I have 6 fans 7 including my heatsink fan. there was a TON of dust. Everything is clean and its running about 7 degrees cooler on both the HDD and the processor cause i have monitors on them.

- Did all the windows updates

- Just ran hijack this and am having someone look over it

- ran ewido someone suggested to me and its found alot so far its not done yet

Still working on it am gonna get to the other things you've suggested shorty.

Been running about 25 mins now since the clean and no freeze so far.

 

i hope your power supply is up to the task of 6 fans. ed

 

its 450 its plenty. Never had any problem except now (a year and a half later)

Lmao all of the fans are blue LEDs to. The whole case glows.

but the supply is plenty

 

maybe all the dust and dirt was making it run too hot, best of luck. ed

 

Well if it does seem to be dust and crud and you seem reasonably confident you could also remove the heatsink and refresh the thermal paste can give another 5C improvement.