Help my PC has freezing issues !!!

What usually causes a PC to freeze up, and what can I use to diagnose what is causing it to do this ?

PC specs:

P4 1.6G with 256MB PC133 SDRAM an average video card, with WinXP Pro on the master hard drive being a 40GB and the secondary drive being a 30GB.

 

It's usually PSU inefficiency. What psu do you use? You don't have a system with large watt consumption but you never know.

 

What do you mean Power Supply is all it could be, I do not think so.

 

I still think (no offense )you should post us the PSU brand, wattage and age.
An alternative: maybe your RAM is too small or your virtual memory is not properly configured.
Go to control panel>>perfomance>>system. In the new window click the "advanced" tab and then "settings" in the performance field. Another window, click advanced tab again. At the bottom of the new tab there is a field "virtual memory"; click change and check the "system managed size" option. Click 'apply' and exit the window.

 

Its pretty old computer,first i'd suspect heat,clean out all your heatsinks and blow out the inside of the psu,next I would suspect th harddrive is going,aslo the cpu may need a fresh application of thermal paste

Uf the XP install is an old one it may benifit from a fresh install,do you defrag regular and try and keep at least 20% of the harddrive free?

Running toast will push the cpu to limit if it locks up theres your problem run for a hour or so with all other programs disabled if it locks up theres your problem,it may also be the memory, to test that you can run this second program run it for a few hours if it runs without errors its fine

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Toast_d867.html

http://www.majorgeeks.com/MemTest_d350.html

 

Run the RAM diagnostic as suggested, and download and run the hard drive diagnostic from whoever made your hard drive to check it's integrity...

hopperdave2000