[netyuppie]

well i swapped each stick of RAM out, trying 1, then the other, then both...no difference. safe to assume its not related to the RAM?
what else is there to do? i have spare hard drives i can try to install XP on later and see if that runs fine. but i really doubt its the hard drive.
CPU? i ran a CPU stability test for 11 hours and it reported nothing wrong. it says for perfect results to run it for 24 hours tho, maybe i will try again later.
motherboard doesnt have onboard video, cant bypass the video card.
thanks in advance for any suggestions. i'm out of ideas.