BigMontana

You can download SP2 from here - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/sp2predl.mspx

I'm Michael, 46, from Detroit, father of 4 daughters, the twins, Rosemary and Sharonda are 20, Shanti' is 23 and Nicole 24. I work as a Project Manager for a very large law fim in Detroit. I started out working for Burroughs Corp (Unisys now) back in '77 as a mainframe operator - IBM 360/30 - later moving up to programming - assembler, cobol, fortran and rpg 3 - before switching over to PC's in '93. My first PC was a Heathkit that I paid $700 for back in '77, and s the name implies you had to assemble it, including everything on the board(wasn't very good then at soldering, so I was surprised it actually worked). My first "modern" PC was a Tandy Sensation (which happened to be the last PC I bought as I build my own now). My current rig is: AMD Athlon XP 2200+ Gigabyte 7VRXP 1.5 GB DDR PC2700 1 IBM 30GB HDD 1 WD 120GB Special Editions in a RAID 0 GeForce FX 5950 Ultra Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro Lian Li PC 60 case Minolta PagePro 1350W Laser printer Epson Stylus R800 My laptop is an IBM X40 1.2 Ghz Centrino 40GB HDD 12.1" XGA display WiFi a/b/g Ultrabay Combo drive 7hr extended life battery A light 2.5lbs and .5" thick

The Intels only advantage over the Sis mobo is its integrated CSA network interface. SiS' 655TX is a lot cheaper and offers the bottom-line best price/performance ratio($150 for the Sis vs, $200 for Intel).

This is more then likely caused by your video card. I have seen this many times withe XP and nVidia vid cards. I would boot into safe mode, uninstall your current video drivers, remove the video card from device manager and do a refresh(do not let XP reinstall the drivers) then install the latest reference drivers from nVidia, also you may want to disable memory caching in your BIOS as well. I have also seen where anti virus programs cuase this error as well, so as a first step disable you AV progam first and see if the cures the problem, if it does you may need an update to the program or a new one altoghter (I recommend AVG as it is not such a resource hog like Symantec). You also didn't say if your file system was NTFS or FAT32, if NTFS you could have a corrupt file system, in which case you need to boot from the XP cd and select repair from recovery console then at the prompt type Chkdsk /f/r to detect and repair disk errors. Good luck and I hope I have been of some help.

I prefer the old tried an true way of Thermal Paste removal. From the CPU Core: Use high-purity isopropyl alcohol and a bit of careful rubbing. Do not use nail polish remover as it contains fragrance oils and other contaminants. From the Heatsink: Use xylene based products (Goof Off, some carburetor cleaners and many brake cleaners.) or mineral spirits. From the CPU ceramic: Use any of the following cleaners. Any dish detergent (Dawn, Lux, Palmolive, Etc.) Do not use soap for an automatic dishwasher to clean a CPU. WD-40, citrus based grease removers (Goo Gone, Etc.) Xylene based products (Goof Off, some carburetor cleaners and many brake cleaners.) Mineral spirits. (Be careful to keep the mineral spirits away from the core.) Once the majority of the compound has been removed from the ceramic, small patches remaining on the ceramic can be 'erased' with a soft eraser. The above is what I have used for many years with success and are products that everyone has on hand. I printed this out a long time ago from Arctic Silvers web site and am sure it is still current. Who better to learn how to remove thermal paste?