Intermittent, never happens consistently, could be 5 minutes or 2 days.

Change this setting:

rt. click My Computer then click Properties then Advanced then Startup and Recovery Settings then unclick Automatically restart

Also: look in your event viewer: rt. click My Computer then click Manage then Event Viewer.
Open the system as well as the application tabs & look for X errors. Click error line for details.
Post back the source & event id especially of errors that seem to coincide with a crash.

Also do a search for any .dmp files. Got any?

Source: Service Control Manager Event ID:7000 Found no .dmp files.

Service Control Manager 7000

How about more details. What exactly do you mean by "Speeds Up" then "Kicks Offline"?

Speed Up? Freeze? Reboots?

Did this just start to happen? Any new hardware/ software?

Aware of any heat issues? Is this an old computer?

What is the Video Card? How much & what type RAM? CPU?

Try running check disk:

start > run > cmd
in the new window type chkdsk/f
when prompted to run on boot choose Y & reboot
this will check for & fix any disk errors

It sounds like the HDD is working extra fast or another fan has kicked in to start cooling, gets really loud like an airplane ready for takeoff. Doesn't really freeze, it just gets really slow and then will hangup from AOL but pc is fine after AOL shuts down. Am currently using AOL 9.0 Optimized SE dial-up.It was rare when first noticed but, recently it does it while playing slots at www.neopets.com mainly and rarely at other sites at the web address.No new hw or sw, hdd was just recovered and restored recently due to an AOl gpf error that would kick it offline and also use an AOL optimized disk to install AOL so we wouldn't have to download all aol sw. No Heat issues that am aware of. It is an HP that is less than a year old, purchased July of '04. Video card is ATI Radeon9200MCE AGP. 512MB PC3200 DDR SDRAM and a Pentium 4 3GHZ w/Hyper Threading.

Thanks for the details!

I know nothing about AOL but within the day someone that might see something there will probably pass thru.

My first suggestion would be to check the hard drive. Do you know the make?

Here is a list of diagnostic tools by various manufacturers:

http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

You will need to download the diagnostic & then create a bootable floppy to check your hard drive.

Let us know if you need help with that process.

HDD is a Samsung SP1604N. Will go check address and see if I have any questions about the diagnostics. Thank you for all of your suggestions so far!