Crashing - XP or not?

[Shirker]

Hi. Picked up this forum address from this month's PC Answers so 'hello'.

Bit of a Jackanory this, but bear with me...

Have XP, up to date with all the updates, running on a reasonably new PC (about 8 months old). Never had any problems until a few weeks ago, co-inciding with the installation of iTunes. Shortly after that XP started crashing - just freezing up completely, then once restarted it would be OK.

Over the last few weeks its got worse and worse, and in Apple's favour, with anything or nothing running other than the background stuff. Sometimes its crashed just sitting there with nobody using it, sometimes when using Word, doing a virus scan, iTunes, internet explorer, Outlook. No pattern. And it does it a lot now, up to four times a day.

It got to the point that I was pulling the plug on it so often Windows was having real trouble starting up so on Tuesday I did a Windows repair, but then yesterday it crashed as normal. I gave up and did a complete re-install of XP. During that, I got rid of all the partitions and cleared the hard drive, then started a format prior to installing Windows, and it crashed during the format, even without Windows installed.

Eventually I got it installed and for six hours or so it worked perfectly, then this morning its crashed twice again.

Anyone got any thoughts or suggestions? The hard drive has had check after check on it yesterday, from virus scans to a Disk Check. All came back clean. What's got me stuck is that its now a complete new install, and that it did crash that once without Windows being there.

Am I missing something obvious here? Is it XP or something more technical?

[Shirker]

Oh, forgot to say:

P4 3.6
512MB RAM, (don't know what type but I know its a single stick rather than 2 x 256)
XP is completely up to date
Norton Internet Security 2005 - up to date
250GB internal HDD and 250GB external HDD.
Medion PC.

[s7p9a2m4]

Could be over heating. Could be bad ram. Could be bad power supply. I would have added bad hard drive but you say it is good.

Memtest will check your ram. You can download a diagnostic from the hard drive maker. Pull the side off the computer and check fans and clean with compressed air. Run with side off for extra cooling and see if that helps for a bit.

I'm leaning towards bad power supply but check everything else first. Most manufacturers buy cheapo psu with the minimum requirements.

[Shirker]

I was talking rubbish with the RAM, its 2 x 256 DDR. I've taken one out and will see if it crashes, then if it does swap it for the other and see if that crashes it. I tried playing with memtest but failed miserably - nothing software related, just ineptitude!

If that gives no result I'll work on another of your suggestions and put a new power supply in.

Ta for the poitners.