What you have to remember is that Microsoft Windows isn't the most stable OS ever invented and there are a myrid of problems in it before you even start to worry about other things.
Without knowing the OS and M'Board it is a bit hard to say but if you are running XP with SP1 installed and have an older M'Board it could be SP1 as there where quite a few bits of hardware that where XP compatable but the moment that SP1 was installed things just stoped working or worse still the HDD was wiped like one I had here several months ago. That turned out to be the DVD drive that wasn't XP SP1 compatable and it was a nightmare as I continually loaded XP and then SP1 only to see it load normally and when it came tim eto reboot things shut down OK and then nothing except "Insert a Boot Drive" or something similar.
I worked out that it was probably some form of hardware fault so I disconected everything except the DVD drive as I thought it more likely to be the CDRW. But that was another long time consuming Free job that was only susposed to take a few minutes on a Sunday afternoon when I was dropped in it by a friend. The original problem was the computer was giving a warning of imenint HDD failure and I was told that he only wanted a new HDD fitted. It should have been an easy job but turned out to be a nightmare which of course I didn't get paid for all the time that I wasted on it.
