If this is in the wrong section please forgive me & feel free to move it accordingly...

Hello all! I am at a loss and finally decided it would be best to ask from someone with more knowledge than myself. Here is a little back ground...

A while back my computer started to continually restart itself to which I found was due to overheating as a result of a bad power supply fan. We replaced the power supply with a new one (old one was a 200W the new one is 500W). That was around Feb/March..

In Nov/Dec we added a new Western Digital harddrive to increase capacity as the old one was only 40G the new one is 160G and acts as master, while the old one now serves as a data only drive for files & such. In addition a new CD RW was added at that same time as well. A New Video Card was added around early Feb as well just before the power supply.

About a month after the replacement of the power supply we started to get the "blue screen of death" and random crashes & restarts. We have been trying to figure out what was wrong since & can't seem to come to any conclusions.

We reformatted the hard drive (the 160G) yesterday thinking maybe there was a virus or something that McAfee wasn't catching. Also figuring it would give us a clean start. We thought we solved the problem with that when suddenly it crashed againg. Here is what we have tried doing sense (I will post the specs of the computer at the end) ...

- checked that all cords are plugged in properly
- tried using a different power supply cable.
- tried plugging the old power supply back in
- tried putting the old video card back in
- tried installing the opperating system on back on the old hard drive & unplugged the new one (it crashed before that was even done)
- tried setting bios settings to default (optimal)
- unplugged the CD RW
- Ran a memtest (which passed 100%)
the memtest screen showed the following info:
Athlon XP (.18) 1094 mhz
L1 Cache 128K 6712 mb/s
L2 Cache 256K 2228 mb/s
memory 1024m 791 mb/s
chipset nVidea nForce2 SSP / FSB: 99mhz
settings: Ram 165 mhz (DDR331) / CAS: 2.5-3-3-7 Dual Channel 128b


We figured by trying each of these it may narrow it down to where the problem was ... with each attempt we still got a system crash, blue screen or the system would restart itself. What could we be missing??

Our system specs are as follows
the processor is an AMD Athlon 1.7 (with a copper heatsink & fan on it)
video card is a nVidea geforce 512mb
160G hard drive -master (reformated yesterday - only operating system & drivers have been reloaded)
40G hard drive -slave serves as file storage only
motherboard model is:
1024mb total ram (2 512 cards)

if Ive missed important info please let me know!

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

try to check event viewer

ok we just looked at that, but I am not sure what I am looking for. It does give a few errors that seem to relate to McAffee antivirus, but they are initialization errors that relate to the program not loading all the way because the system crashed before it was fully loaded.

What specifically should I be looking for in there??

after reloading the OS, did you install Mcafee?

yes we did.

Also upon reading another post by howard_hopkins I followed this advice in hopes that it may show me an error "Right click my computer and select properties then the advanced tab, and under startup and recovery click settings and uncheck the box that says automatically restart, also set the write debugging information to none."

Also ... we copied the last 5 minidumps in hopes someone can read them & help identify the problem