my home pc is still just a 3.0 p4 with 1gb of ram and I cannot for the life of me get it to hang or crash. I actually just got a new SATA hdd in it and put xp and has yet to truly crap out on me as I anticipated with everything open.

And if the data is so important make sure you have at least 2 forms of backup on it, either on another drive and a cd or something. Everyday at work I am always givin a situation with a company forgot to back up their records and they end up paying thousands when their hard drives crap out.

My data is backed up on a secondary USB hard drive, a secondary internal as well as the important is backed up to DVD...some call it extreme but there is nothing more than I hate than loosing **** on a computer.


And yes I generally have 4 or so firefox windows open with as many as 10 tabs in each. Along with several other programs....and It still runs fien. Since I only have a 256K connection I will load up all the threads I missed or have not read, open them up in a tab, and come back in a few minutes to read em.

Another thing...

are you running adaware on the system regularly, not just have it installed but clean the system once a week?

Well with just Firefox or IE open I usually don't have an issue. I also usually have quite a few tabs open as long as I don't have the other programs running. But in the last few months I've started using pretty heavy programs (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Excel with large files, 150meg+ pdf files...) and that'* when the problems came up.

I do a CD backup and also store select important files on a secure remote server. That way if there'* ever a fire I'm still in good shape.

I run Adaware, Spybot *&D, and BPS in rotations weekly, not just installed. I also run HijackThis roughly montly just to check a few things I could catch. I also run a virus checker montly. I have a host of other tweaking programs (registry cleaners and what-not) I run every so often and do a smart placement defrag with Perfect disk every day.

I try to keep the computer running as smoothly as possible, that'* another reason this problem is so frustrating. I keep thinking about upgrading again, but for what I do this comp is generally fast enough if not for this issue.

I'm running just a tad more than I usually do (no problems yet!) but here'* my task manager screenshot incase anything sticks out to someone:

taskman.jpg