"Andy Martin @clara.co.uk" andymartinnospam wrote in message
...
Hi

Just had a call from a friend who's machine insists on going belly-up at
regular intervals.

I built this machine for him over a year ago and he called me up a few
weeks
back to saythat it kept crashing for no obvious reason. It only started
round about the time that he installed a kids media cd so I thought it was
a
conflict somewhere in windows. Did what i could by uninstalling it and
other
junk in there and it worked for about a week - then it started up again.

Today, I brought it home, reformatted it (98SE), installed drivers,Office
97, etc and had it working fine at my place. Tried it back at his and all
was well. 3 hrs later, he phones me up and tells me it's looking for it's
drivers and crashing all the time on start-up.

The machine has a Jetway V266A Mobo, a 40Gb disk and 512Mb SDRAM and is
partitioned into 7Gb 33Gb. Seeing as it was fine at my house and is
variable
at his, this makes me think that it is some other defective piece of
hardware. My thoughts are with the monitor - Peter bought it from ebay a
while ago along with a tempremental keyboard/mouse. Would I be correct in
thinking that if any of them were 'goosed', that could cause this problem?

I dare say, I'll be doing another reformat in the next couple of days
butI'd
appreciate any suggestions / tips

Andy

I don't see how the monitor could be the problem. What drivers is it
looking for on start-up? I would be more inclined to be thinking bad video
card,or Ram. Will it operate OK in Safe Mode? If so, I'd be looking at the
video card, or maybe some program that is loading on start up. Try to
configure it to run without anything starting up in background.