Symptoms of a flawed system

My desktop still doesn’t want to boot half of the time: it has a hard time getting past the XP progress bar on a regular boot, or “mup.sys” during a safe mode boot. So I reinstalled Windows on a new hard drive. Cool that works. For the first 5 days or so. Then it’s back to same same: Windows won’t boot, and if it does, it freezes after a few hours. Turn off all power to the system for 10-60 minutes, and it might reboot some of the time.

Looking for a solution

Alright, maybe it’s not getting enough power. Take out the 3rd SATA disk. Now it’s using the same amount of power as it did prior to instability issues. No luck—same trouble. Unless the PSU is issuing dirty power must be something else instead.

Hmmm… better check RAM. Different combinations. No luck.

Upgrade BIOS. No luck.

Just to make sure: re-install Windows, again. No joy past the first few days.

Take out all power cords & re-insert them. No luck.

Set my DRAM timings manually. No luck.

Oh bother. Those shiny new Macs start to look more appealing by the minute…