"May-day! May-day! We've been hit, and are going down! AHHH!!!"

*boom!*

A re-enactment of my system crashing...

Every 13-15 minutes...

My dad and me finally got it to work. A7N8X (non-deluxe) with 30 gig WD Caviar (very old) HD, AMD Athlon XP 3200, and some crappy 7 dollar PCI ONLY vid card.

As happy as I am right now that I can finally use my own computer for once, it comes with indominable frustration, since every 15 minutes or so, my system simply restarts.

Sometimes I'm watching a movie, it restarts.

Sometimes I'm using IE, and it restarts.

Sometimes I'm not even doing anything at all. My IE browser is sitting there, doing nothing, and it restarts.

GARGH! I'm hoping it's because I have such an old, beat up HD. That's what I'm really hoping, however, I'm very worried that my mobo might have been damaged *somehow* in the process of getting windows to install on the antique hard drive.

I tried getting a SATA PCI adapter card. It got to the "Press enter to install Windows XP" blue-screen. If I press enter, I see a glimpse of the progress bar before Windows graciously tells me that it encountered a serious error. (The dark blue screen with grey-ish writing) I mean, I must've seen every type of error screen that Windows XP has to offer (except my friend gets some really weird ones...) and I'm getting I---I this much worried that something other than my antique HD might be damaged....

Any help is appreciated, and I know how much of a bother these types of posts must be for the seasoned veterans. I moderate another forum about an online game, and find myself having to repeatedly tell each newbie that signs up the answer to their question, even though they could have simply searched the history for 2 seconds and foun their answer, or looked at the FAQ.

But right now, I'm up a tree without a paddle... Or whatever.

Thank you in advance for any help.