not only cpu overheat could lead to system crash, video card overheat can also crash the system. samething apply to almost every components, eg HDD could overheat that lead to crash. But, in your case, I first suspect the RAM is faulty. Jun Qian ----- Original Message ----- From: "Randy J. Anderson" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Sunday, July 08, 2001 11:31 AM Subject: [PCBUILD] Help!!!!!!!!! My AMD Athlon PC system is acting erratic!!!!!!!!! > I builded my AMD Athlon 900 mhz with Soyo K7VTA-B motherboard (socket A/462) and POST and Windows 98 booting is successful but everytime I leave my AMD Athlon PC on for approximately 15 minutes, it always crashes (locks up and fails to respond to any input!) (no error messages) (no blue screens of death) > (no illegal operation errors) and even after I disabled standby under Windows 98 SE and still the same thing!!!!!!!!! There was no evidence that the CPU was overheating (under "PC Health Status" in Award BIOS setup everything was OK including CPU temp no higher than 115 degrees) (probably all Soyo motherboards have an Award BIOS). My floppy disk drive failed to boot with my boot floppy with a disk IO error and under Windows no mat > ter what floppy I inserted, Windows 98 would hang (not crash but delay a longer than usual) and my Zip 100 drive was extremely slow and it kept on start and stop spinning every 1 second > (kept on blinking on and off). The NOSPIN Group provides a monthly newsletter with great tips, information and ideas: NOSPIN-L, The NOSPIN Magazine Visit our web site to signup: http://freepctech.com