System crashing

Windows XP 2 -- ASUS A8V - 512 DDR RAM - AMD Athlon 3500+

Mother Nature paid me a visit. I returned after a storm to find my computer dead. Replaced the power supply with an Antec 430 watt but still no go. Put in a new ASUS A8V and AMD Athlon processor and was up and going again. I do some Word Perfect word processing, Quicken has my check book and some light net surfing, when I need the answer to something - like now - and that's about it; not a heavy computer user. But like my car, I expect it to go when I turn the key and get me back home without having to use a wrecker. Well, that said, my computer seemed to be working just fine after the "transplants" last weekend. But as the week progressed, I started getting crashes followed by a box to report my error to Microsoft. They are getting more frequent. I can't do much on the internet without that box popping up saying sorry for the inconvenience, but it was going to have to shut me down and do I want to send an error report. It has been a while since I had to do a mboard/processor replacement and I am not sure if I overlooked something. All I did was replace the parts and of course Microsoft made me reactivate XP. I don't know where to start. How do I know if I got a bad precessor, mother board, power supply or maybe even RAM. Is subing a known good part the only way?

 

When you change your hardware did you reformat your harddisk and re-install
your operating system (windows XP).

If not that your problem when changing hardware mobo and CPU you need
to re-format and re-install.....

 

Nope. Did not reformat and reinstall. Didn't want to loose everything on my hard drive. If this is the case, maybe I am lucky it came up at all. I guess I can dump everything I need to save, reformat the drive, reinstall Windows XP and hope they with let me reactivate. I just reactivated it last week, they may not like me doing it again.

 

i get problems like yours ever so offten.......and i normally end up reinstalling windows too.

i think i reinstalled windows. 40 or more times
my version is the first full version that was made for sale.has no update patches

i never have a problem with microsoft..........but here latley i have to call them
and they give me a new key code each time

 

I may be wrong, but it seems like, in some of the earlier versions of Windows, just as with some applications, you can just do an install right over the top of the current copy. Is this a possibility? That way I would not have to dump my programs and data and then have to reload them too after the reformat. So can I just do a reinstall of XP and its drivers right on top? Is this the best way or the only way? It would be false time economy if I could put a new copy over the top only to have it start doing crazy things, because of that, later down the road.