hi,

I have anAcer desktop comes with Win Vista home Prem SP1 (2 yrs old). Intel Core Duo CPU. 2GB RAM. 32-bit Operating Sys. Motherboard is Intel Chipset G31-M7 (1 yr old).
I only use PC for surfing, reading mails & word processing.

In the past month, PC has been hanging many times almost everyday. Have encounter blue screens frequently. PC also reboots on its own. This week, there were error "overclocking failed" when booting up.

For Overclocking - I went to setup (as instructed in error msg) & choose load optimal defaults. It runs OK after but will problem will return the next day.

Yesterday, my PC hanged while the blue screen appeared so am able to note down the error message below (Past blue screens have different error & tech info, but it ran too fast for me to note anything)

Driver_IRQL_Not_Less _or_equal

Technical Info:
STOP : 0x000000D1 (0x0000100, 0x00000002, 0x00000000, 0x87D3FE6D)
USBPORT.SYS - Address 87D3FE6D base at 87D3D000, Datestamp 47919053

Grateful for help with the various problems. I'm not IT/PC/tech savy. But I should be able to follow step by step instructions.

I can provide more info, if needed (but *** tell me where to look for it).

A few months back my computer was rebooting on it's own.
This machine had 2 memory sticks on motherboard.

I had an extra memory stick for that machine...
Did a coin flip and switched one of the memory sticks,
Problem has not happened since.

But I also think something like that may be a power supply problem or a overheating problem, make sure your fans still a blowin.

Have you done some of the common things like defrag your hard drive and remove any unneeded progrms to free up space? Then you can do a memtest and check your memory and see if it is hanging up your machine. Do you know if its one stick or 2?

You can run most tests using a bootable CD, like UBCD if you have trouble getting into your system.

You could test various parts of the computer to eliminate what may be wrong. On the UBCD there is a RAM tester that will tell you if there is a bad sector within one of your chips.

You could also run a drive test, this you can do via chkdsk or using the UBCD. This will tell you if your computer is having hard drive issues.

Next you can stress test the CPU. This will run random data to be computed through the CPU to make sure there are no bad registers or what not.

If you're interested I can post step by step instructions on each.