just to clarify, what psu are you currently using and how many watts is it rated for?

also, you should consider the general low-quality of winfast motherboards. i wouldn't be surprised if the unreliable behavior you are describing is being caused by said board. in any case, i recconed that you get a quality replacement board (they are pretty inexpensive these days for your cpu) based on the nforce2 chipset.

its a colorsit 500w and its a replacement for the one that came with the case which was 250w and only had 13A on the +12v. so that cant be the problem at least i dont think it could be.

edit: i just took another look at my mobo and noticed that the HDD cable was in IDE2 and my DVD roms cable was in IDE1, so i switched those around. and i also noticed that the jumpers on the back of the DVD rom were set for slave so i fixed that. dont know if that will help at all but ya never know, we'll see.

Sounds Like a RAM problem to me...

Sounds to like a ram problem to me...

What brand are you using?

I swear by Kingston, but many pro builders like myself also like:

Corsair, Crucial (Not my favorite), Mushkin, etc.

The RAM market is very similar to the power supply situation.

YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR!

Dont expect clear sailing on Kbyte RAM, particularly on a high quality mobo.

A good example is when a customer requested an ASUS board, but wanted to use this crappy Kbyte PC2700 DDR he bought from Office Max on sale. The board was great but untill we got a good stick of Kingston in there, it crashed all the time and had the same symptoms as yours. Most usually it crashed during video games.

Sounds like your memory is not refreshing properly and is loosing critical system information like the USB file you refered to. When the system tries to get at that file and can't find it at the address it sent it to, it freaks out and stops the system to protect itself.

Thats Microsoft for you. Rather than write scripts to recover from this type of problem, they'd rather have the system halt and you loose all of your work!

hmmmm.

I had 3 sticks of ram in my system. 1 crucial and 2 kingston value select. Both kingstons recently went tits up. So I can't say from experience that kingston is good. I have sent them in for an RMA... I hope Kingston stands by it.

i'd say that corsair modules are the safest bet, but have nad relatively little trouble with kingston as well. corsair shines with thier XMS series...

similar specs, no problem

Your system specs are almost exactly like mine, excpet the AMD 2.2 ghz i have P4 2.4ghz. I have never had problems with my 5200 FX card, and actually have never had problems that serious(it runs COD2 demo quite crappy though, big problem).
Try this...
go to >start>run then type dxdiag. This will give all of your system specs including directx .dll files, you can see if any are damaged or corrupted here. Under the last tab you can display all of your recent errors. This is if you are using the machine that crashes all the time, or else it is useless. Sorry if this is no help. my guess is your OS. :approve:

Similar Spec too

I have a new build of a similar spec doing the same things but everything seems to work fine until I install either XP SP1a or SP2
Spec. The motherboard came as a bundle and supposedly tested.
Sempron 2600
480MB RAM (32 on the onboard video)
WinFast Motherboard
80 SATA Maxstor HDD

Antec Aria 300Watt case
+5v 26A
+12v 18A
+3.3v 27A
-12v 0.8A
+5v ab 2A

All I want to run on it is IIS. No need for a big graphics cards, massive HDD or DVD drives. So Microsofts work around on seems to point to a DVD drive problem so much I as want to point the finger I fear it may be hardware and the motherboard.

I've now reinstalled XP 7 times, everytime finding it stable, but once SP1a or 2 are installed it gets difficult to get enough time to uninstall.

Now on install 7 and crossing my fingers.