Quake3World

so my dad has a 3 year old system...sometimes it will freeze up on him while he is using it.. and even in the process of booting up sometimes.

he doesn't run any demanding application by any means, and it seems to happen on a very random basis with no apparent scenario.

what could it be? it has to be hardware because I have reinstalled windows and the same problem persists.

It's not a video card because it has been changed.
so we are left with : cpu, mobo, power supply, memory

which one do I try out first?

Freeze up requiring restart or freeze up then resume (how long?)?

You forgot hard drive/cable as a possible source of the problem.

it freezes indefinitely... sometimes it would reboot if I remember correctly

and I am 80% I used a diff. hardrive to install windows last time around

and no the other hdd is not still connected on that machine

edit
I'm 100% I changed hdd

it's a socket 478 i think those are pentiums, don't they have some kind of overheating protection system?

swap the memory first

i've had a weird thing happen aswell to my system

OT was downloading a torrent, plugged in a USB key and the system rebooted for some unknown reason, but it's fine now... weird.

Hard Drive may be failing.

speaking from personal experience the power supply can give you totally random freezes/crashes.

if it has more than 1 stick of ram you could try each one by itself to rule that out.

I did try that memory idea as a matter of fact, but I never got to testing out the second one by itself... it's so hard diagnosing this for me since the computer is not at my place and the problem is so random...slow progress

update :
it's not the memory ( unless both sticks are bad)
it's not the power supply ( just got a new one, that got returned)

so mobo vs cpu lol?

could it be overheating? maybe some thermal paste might solve the problem

yeah could be that. a good cleaning of the system, re-apply some thermal paste.

kinda shitty but you'll have to check just about everything.

It does sound like a CPU overheating. If it was bad caps on the mobo, you'd most likely be seeing random BSODs.