blue screen of death

I am running a student version of Windows 2000 issued thru Devry University. Recently I have experienced a rash of memory dumps, aka… blue screen of death, is this an OS related problem or hardware? I am running a PIII 800mhz(about 2yrs old, viper770 32mb video, soundblaster live (both about 3yrs old) and 512mb ram.