One side note... Instead of a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) when Windows locks up, XP will usually catch the bad condition and force a reboot if it can. If it's a pre-install (yuck**), it may be one of those additional "value added" programs the manufacturer tries to chuck in there causing a problem. If you can, and the manufacturer wasn't dumb enough to rely on a "restore partition", re-install the OS from scratch. If you can do it w/o adding all those silly programs that say, HP or Dell chuck in there, even better. /P ** The only time I'll ever use a pre-installed operating system is when I buy a Mac, because OSX and its proggies were specifically built for the box. Anything else? I flush the hard drive completely and totally, then do an install of just the OS (I usually put Linux or FreeBSD in there anyway, but even back when I used Windows it was the same story).