Original Post
My computer's been acting really strangely lately - it's started to crash (without any particular reason) at totally random moments. Description of the crash: There's a very quiet beep that sounds like it could be made by the PC speaker (it comes from within the tower), about 1/2 - 1 second(s) in length, after which the computer hangs without ANY other sign of failure. Furthermore, I sometimes hear the same beep and the computer doesn't hang (I don't know whree precisely the beep is coming from - could it be CPU temp?). The crash leaves the whole system paralyzed: the mouse becomes inactive, there's no activity on the screen, but the last drawn frame remains displayed (I guess this rules out the graphics card), and the HDD light remains on (indefinitely). When crashed, there's a constant high pitch squeal (not as loud as standard PC speaker sound, I guess). I can press reset to reboot the computer and it starts up normally, scan disk isn't run. I have and old GF2, relatively new RAM, 2 relatively new Seagate HDD's, a 2 yr old Athlon CPU (the mainboard is roughly as old). I have Windows XP (DirectX 8.1c) and no other hardware or software issues (POST completes just fine and I'm relatively sure the hard drives are okay). Description of when: The funny thing is that there is absolutely no correlation as to when this can and does happen: it could be 5 minutes after start-up when the only window open is the Explorer or it could be 8 hours after the computer has been running primariliy Prime 95. Or sometimes this doesn't happen at all. I recently also upgraded the video drivers, but that doesn't seem to have helped a whole lot. I can't explain this, but it's really quite annoying, especially if you start losing work because of it. Any ideas?