OK so ill start by saying that i wouldnt consider myself an amatuer in regards to computers and this is not the first problem that ive had to deal with nor is it the first computer ive built. I guess it all started when i was tryin to install XP for the first time (after a fresh build and everything is fresh) during installation all seemed to be fine until about 7-9 minutes remaining and it would crash everytime installing on exactly the same part...okay i had a copy of vista lyin around so i thought id try installing that...no dice...to an extent. (oh and inbetween installin xp and vista i first tried downloadin knoppix and seeing if that runs...and it did, with absolutely no problems whatsoever. i also tried putting in an old disk with a previous installation of windows xp in just to see if that worked...and it did...) so then i try installin vista and it gives me hassle during the installation but this time it gives me the option to disable driver signiature enforcement. so i gave that a try and weyhey! it finalizes the installation and as far as i know my problem is kind of over...or is it? during the new few months of using vista id say that 90% of the time i start my pc up it comes up with an error and i have to disable the driver signiature enforcement everytime to get into windows and for a while windows was working fine like this but now it seems to crash at random and much more frequently even with the driver signiature enforcement disabled. it is a problem i need to resolve! what could it be?? help!! My current system... Windows Vista Ultimate 32bit MSI - MS-7387 (motherboard) Intel Pentium 4 @ 3.6 ghz 2gb RAM Radeon X850 1x 80gb IDE HDD 1x 200gb SATA HDD Thanks again!
Sounds like a hardware error, I have had similar errors when some cheap ram I bought overheated, hard to spot such an error since it takes time for the chips to overheat. I didn't find the problem untill I removed the ram & checked it by eye (the heat spreaders had warped from the extreme heat!). ...Of course, if the northbridge is overheating, it will cause the same problem, and your mainboard is made by a company that can't even keep their own website running half the time...
I've found Linux will boot on a machine that crashes in windows on a fresh install (both XP and Vista) - it's almost always a hardware fault in this case (certainly if you're using 32-bit versions of the Windows OSes) Do you have any specific error messages or BSOD error codes we can look up?