Random freezing

Well, my computer has been randomly freezing and rebooting for a while, and it's steadily gotten worse. New RAM has made no difference, and I've disabled everything in the BIOS and it would still do it. It's only windows and linux that freezes, because DOS still works fine.

I've flashed my BIOS with a few different BIOS versions (some for other boards) and in fact I almost thought I had completely killed my system. I got frustrated with the award BIOS flashing program because it limited me to what BIOSes i could use, so I used uniflash to put on more 'exotic' BIOSes. I put on the BIOS for the P4MDU533 motherboard. Then, the computer was well, buggered. It would just boot up, and do nothing. If you pressed the reset button, it would start booting again, and just make a big long beep. But, I switched my RAM over to my other RAM slot and took out my AGP video card and I was able to reflash the BIOS back to something a bit more correct.

Flashing the BIOS has had little effect, and I'm not sure what to do. I've made a list of my hardware if this helps:

Jetway P4MFU533 motherboard
Intel 1.7GHz Celeron w/128KB cache
256MB Kingston DDR RAM
LITE-ON 52x CD Burner
40GB Seagate Barracuda HD
400w P4-compatible PSU
64MB GeForce 2 MX 400

The only thing that had a slight effect was turning off the CPU Cache, and this made the computer pretty much unbearable to use.

Please help.

 

Ah well, it doesn't matter now. I tried one too many BIOS flashes and I can't seem to recover from this one. I still would've liked to have known what went wrong on it. I suspect it's a dodgy electrical connection on the motherboard

 

Sounds like you've dug yourself quite a hole there. From reading other's similar experiences and helping them, it is most likely a hardware problem, most likely overheating. See if taking off/opening your computer case helps at all. Also, your computer appears to be quite outdated so maybe it would be in your best interest to just build a new one

 

Yeah, I was planning on getting a new one within a month anyway. I'm pretty sure it's not overheating, because it will also do it first thing in the morning. I also cleaned the heat sink and applied a new layer of thermal grease (before i killed my computer), and that didn't make much difference at all.