~misfit~ wrote:

> I could use some prompt advice re: the subject line.
>
> First, it must be said that, while I'm fairly up with the play with Intel
> gear these days, AMD is a bit of a mystery to me. However I'm a fast
> learner.
>
> A friend bought a lemon. It has an Asus M3A (vanilla) mobo and a crappy
> Thermaltake 430 W PSU, both of which, IMO, need replacing. He bought it to
> me a week or so afer buying it as it kept crashing. I Googled both the
> above components and realised that the company who sold him the PC were
> obviously getting rid of lemons.
>
> The rest of the PC seems OK. Phenom 9500, Seagate SATA II 500 GB 7200.11
> HDD. Asus optical drive. XFX 9600GT PCIe card, Thermaltake Soprano case..
>
> Despite me getting the PC to what I thought was a stable condition a
> couple weeks ago it's crashing on him every 15 - 30 minutes. It's random
> and doesn't seem to be tied to load, either graphics or CPU. He's decided
> that he'd like to keep everything except the mobo and PSU and get me to
> rebuild for him. (RAM? We'll face that if/when we come to it. It's a
> single 2 GB stick of DDR2/400 AFAIK)

i would test the ram before you bye any thing and if possible test the other
components in another pc. from my experiance it sounds like a memory
problem.

to test that it is not the os run a live linux cd/dvd and see what happens
it won't cost you nothing or time to do that.