I'm losing my patience with my pc..!!

[ClaireyFairy]

forgive me, this could be a long drawn out post!! ( my apologies if this is in the wrong section, but my suspicions are its something to do with my BIOS / boot sector)

first of all my specs (or what i can gather from the motherboard as the machine is a bucket of *@&$!!!

Intel Pentium 4 3.20 GHz
Dual Channel DDR AGP 8X (?? unsure wether this is relevant)
Radeon 9600 256Mb DDR V/D/VO
Graphics/ Video - Sapphire ATI ( ? )
RealTek onboard LAN Card
1 Gig DDR RAM
Running Windows XP
i also have 5 fans, to prevent over heating
and all the normal gumf, CD, DVD/R/Rw, floppy, 3 USB's & blah blah

age 2 weeks!!!

ok where do i start, my first problem was the comp crashing during applications. Ctrl, Alt Del does not work, mouse, keyboard nothing, had to switch of machine and restart

this then got worse, and would crash just after windows had started, then crashing before the start up screen. no it swithces off by itself, and i am lucky VERY LUCKY to actually see the windows logo

if i do, it will run for about 5 minutes and crash again.

I am losing my patience BIG STYLE.

i am currently a 3d Animation Student, I desperatley require my computer and i run quite memory hungry applications, Softimage Xsi, PhotoShop, After Effects. for my 3d work i require the comp to be able to handle the render times, but this pc is just severly taking the &*%$!!

I curently own 3 pcs, and have never encountered this problem before..

i am clueless, absolutely clueless as to what the prob could be..

any help would be GREATLY appreciated.. and HAPPILY recieved

Kind Regards Clairey