I had a computer built by a shop with a pentium 4 processor, 2Gb kingston ram, matrox 64mb graphics card, a Pulsar sound card (5 years old given to me by a friend) and two internal drives. I am a musician and very inexperienced in computer hardware. From day one the computer has been unreliable, after an hour or so the screen freezes and there is usually a looping noise too. It does not seem to make any difference what programme I am using. The shop have fitted a fan to the graphics card, double fans to the hard drives and an intake 80mm fan at the front and exhaust fan at the back. I have added a fan to the side panel and there is a super cooler fan on the cpu. I have taken out the Pulsar card and fitted a new EMU card but the problem still occurs. The shop have also replaced both drives and a friend of mine did a memory test on the RAM which was fine. Unfortunately I live in a city where there are no specialists (Dubai) and I feel my problem could be solved by one. has anyone experienced this problem and can you recommend how I can resolve it please.
Thanks, this smilie sums up my mood! :hotbounce

What's the wattage on your power supply?

With all that you should have at least 400W +

the only thing that i can think that your problem is , is that you have a bad processor...or maybe it's because your processor is getting too hot, i'm not sure if you put the thermal gel on it before you fitted the heatsink and fan...if you did do so, i'd say that you had a bad processor, in cases where your power supply could be a problem, i wouldn't think that this is one of those cases , because , a weak PS would give you other indications of not being strong enough, by making weak fan noises or dimming of your video output on screen. so, i don't think it's that. but if i were you , i'd make sure that that processor is getting enough air and has the thermal gel, and also make sure that you plugged in the 5volt 4pin plug ( which i hope your board came with ,and/or your power supply )

What is the make and model of the graphics card? Is it PCI or AGP? If AGP do you know if it's an AGP 4x 8x or 2x? Are you experiencing these freezes in graphic intensive programs, multi tasking situations? Or just out of the blue?

Hi Tedster,
I have a Purepower 480W power supply fitted.

Hi Luvhuffer,
The graphics card is a Matrox 64mb VGA. I will find out whether is is PCI or AGP, I think it's PCI. The freezes happen out of the blue and other than scrolling through manuals in Acrobat Reader I don't do any intensive graphic work.