A friends PC.

[Robert]

Basically for well over a year, a friends PC has been rebooting randomly and quite frequently (most of the time) when playing a game, or before in windows. Now, I finally told him to bring it round and I'd look at it (I consider myself fairly well up with PCs). System is:

Soltek Socket A board
XP2400
512mb DDR400
256mb DDR333
HD
ADSL card
NIC
2*optical
9600
Macron 300


Anyway, I tried resetting the bios - no affect
Installed via drivers - no affect

Now, this is the interesting part. I ran SP2004 and it errored on both the CPU/RAM tests and CPU and RAM on their own. I swapped both sticks of ram (so both where in on their own at different points). SP2004 errored but took much longer with just the 256 stick in. Also I swapped his macron 300 PSU for an old macron 300 i had...and instead of erroring within 10secs it went at about 9 minutes. With the 512 stick &the 256 stick in SP2004 errors much quicker - but nevertheless it errors with either stick in on their own.

I'm thinking it's the motherboard but I'm not sure. Any ideas would be welcome.

[scrandman]

Run memtest: http://www.memtest.org/

Also, might want to check the board for leaking caps - IIRC some of the older Soltek boards were bad for this.