Hardware or Software? that is the question

[MrRadio]

Have an old machine that I keep going simply bcause it has an ISA slot for a WinRadio scanning radio receiver card. It runs largely unattended airchecking a community radio station with only two apps running, Winradio and an app to record the Winradio output. More and more when I go to check it the apps are shut down and there is the "Windows has recovered from a serious error" dialog with an opportunity to send an error report indicating that the machine has self restarted.
The machine is locally put together several years ago, unknown mobo with AMD Duron 1600 1.4 gig with oversized heat sink and fan, 512 meg ram (had 768 but one stick tested u/s with Memtest, remaining sticks test ok) 80 gig HD with clean install XPsp3 (slipstreamed as described in another thread). No antivirus running atm as it didn't play well with Symantec (not enough ram now apparantly) so I had to uninstall it but at last scan all was well. Have tried running the airchecking app in 98/ME compatability mode but still crashes. I really don't know if I should be chasing a hardware or software fault and would appreciate any thoughts

[mickc]

first untick reboot on error in system settings
this may give a clue next failure
try with 1 memory stick only if still failing swap it over
is the sound/video onboard or addon anything else in the slots besides the isa card

[MrRadio]

is the sound/video onboard or addon anything else in the slots besides the isa card

No other ISA slots ... 5.1 sound, video, wireless network occupy the PCI slots. Has on board sound also which solely feeds and monitors the airchecking app, 5.1 sound used for playback and all normal sound requirements.

Will reconfigure memory and try it next time it falls over.

[MrRadio]

Spoke too soon

[z80]

Get rid of the AMD rubbish.
Those early cpus were thermal nightmares.
the boards all had dodgey electrolytics around the CPU area, and the hot cpu doesn't help.

Get an intel p3-xxx and it will run perfectly.

[mickc]

do you have anything next to the isa slot sometimes the first pci is shared

[MrRadio]

5.1 sound