Hello all... I'm new here and was hoping someone could give me some solid advice regarding an issue thats been happening with this pc for a while.  I have a Dell XPS Gen 2, which has a Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz processor, a Radeon 9800 128meg agp 4x video card, and ORIGINALLY came with 512 megs of PC3200 ram which I upgraded to 1gig.

Basically what happens is the PC completely freezes and ends up looping the last sound that was playing over and over and I have to end up holding in the power button to turn it off & restart it.  95% of the time this occurs when I'm using more graphically intensive programs (about once every hour with AutoCAD, and OCCASIONALLY w/ Photoshop, and a few video GAMES I play) but is not limited to these occasions.

I've had a problem with this pc since basically I upgraded the ram in it years ago, which was within a day of purchasing it, and since then has been getting steadily worse -- originally maybe every 3-4 days, to daily, to recently really become ANNOYING and a hindrance, crashing 4-5 times a night.  I've had several suggestions from people I know (reformat your HDD, video card failing, replace the ram, install more fans in the computer) but theyre all over the map and nobody can really tell for sure.  Ive ran tests on the ram years ago when this was first happening and it was showing the ram as functioning fine.

What should I do to pinpoint the cause of this issue?  Does this definitely sound like a hardware issue or could it be a software problem?  Are there virii/trojans out there capable of doing this sort of thing?

If this belongs in the hardware forum, my apologies... moderator please move the thread if its needed.  Thanks in ADVANCE for any help/suggestions given.it hard to tell you with a guess, so what we need to do are try to do one by one steps ok?
have you try taking out the add on card, graphic card, sound card, etc?
then use your computer see if its happen again"I've had a problem with this pc since basically I upgraded the ram in it years ago...".  Major clue here.  Have you tried removing/replacing the troublesome RAM?

Alan <><  try doing registry clean on computer, then do virus / trojan scan, then do anti spyware scan. doesn't matter what order you do it in.

then if computer is clean ... then take out ram

if problem occurs without that ram, then it should be ram problem. if not, reinstall ram carefully and see what you get.

good luck and let us know how you're going with this issue.