Hi

My PC started crashing on boot (during XP logo). It crashes in safemode too. I see a BSOD just before it resets, but dont seem to be able to hold it on the screen. I have halt on all errors set in BIOS.
I randomly managed to get it to boot one time. It showed that my ram was lower than it was before.
I powered off, tried one stick at a time, found that one was totally dud. I've now jsut replaced it all with new ram.

Now My pc boots 95% of the time without resetting its self. But it seems to crash and reset randomly. I tried to play Quake III, it worked for 5 mins, then crashed. I left it on, just running azureus, it stayed on all night, and is still on now.

This makes me think that my graphics card is bust.

But what would kill my ram and graphics card. I feel reluctant to buy an new graphics card, incase whatever happened, happens again. RAM is cheap, 3D graphics cards aint

Any suggestions?

From experience, a cheap motherboard will kill the components connected to it somehow. It is also important to set the correct voltage for the memory modules, this can crash a system if they are not getting enough juice (it should say on the stick itself in Volts). Also, what power supply are you running? Not enough juice for the pc and its newly added goodies will never end to well.

Try the basics first:
1. Clear CMOS
2. Reset BIOS, make appropriate changes to it.
3. Run recovery console (use OS cd) and put in chkdsk /r, this may take some time.
4. Restart normally.

As for the graphics card, if you are running a Nvidia...I highly recommend you download the NV4_Loop fix (http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=4432).