Hello, I hope someone might be able to help. It seems that my computer has decided to start freezing when I run just about any application. I can surf the net, get email and play windows games like solitare, etc. But once I start something like Counter-Strike or Ventrillo or any other program that takes resources, it freezes and won't unfreeze until I reboot.

I checked all 3 sticks of ram individually and the same thing occurred. One of the sticks wasn't even in my comp when it happened. I don't see how it could be the power supply, being that it's new and is not showing any signs of trouble. I did place all 3 sticks in the first slot only, so after reading many other posts on here, I am wondering if I should try slot 3 or what.

What I was doing:

My buddy has the same comp, I built them at the same time. Well his seems to boot a ton faster than mine. He told me he went into BIOS and clicked "Load Optimized Defaults" and it screamed. OK, so I tried it the other night and it seemed to have done a little something. So I did it again last night. Don't know why, just did it a second time. Anyway, I load up and go to get on Vent and it froze. I reboot, try again, freeze. OK, so here I think I did something wrong. I go back to BIOS and "Load Fail/Safe Defaults", same thing. Only this time, when I rebooted I could see nothing. LOL, it seems fail safe loads the PCI vid as default. I have AGP. So that adds some frustration. I fix that. I go through ALL my BIOS settings, make sure they are set how they should be. It still happens. I give up and go to bed.

OK, so that's what happened last night. That's where I am now. Oh ya, my sound has also taken a crap too. I was running my sound through a Creative SB Live! Value. I disabled the onboard sound.

I should mention that for the past couple weeks I have been fighting Spyware crap on my system. I run NoAdware, Spybot Destroyer and I still get crap popping up and my home page hijacked. I have run a virus scan in the midst of this battle and come out clean. I just can't seem to find the damn culprit no matter what I uninstall or what prog I run to get rid of em.

I am getting ready to try a reinstall and see if that does the trick. But now this crap with the freezing came up and I am at a loss.

I should probably inform you of my system:

AMD 1700+ XP on a:
Gigabyte GA-7VAX mobo
VIA KT400 chipset
333/266/200 MHz FSB
RAM Max capacity : Up to 3GB by 3 DIMM slots
1 x AGP slot (8X/4X); 5 x PCI slots
On board Realtek LAN
On board Realtek Sound
Thermaltake VOLCANO 9 Cooler
768MB Ram - Generic (512MB 2100 266, 256MB 2700 333)
GeForce2 MX440 64MB AGP Video
WD 160GB HDD
Creative SB Live! Value sound card
Windows XP Pro OS

There she is, hope this helps anyone to help me, maybe please.

Thanks,
Steve