PC hanging only when playing video

[botanic]

I know it's a curate's egg of a thing, but anyone have any ideas borne of experience? It's a new build, when I am editing video clips or handling them in an authoring package I get periodic freezes - locks everything dead and forces a hard 4 second power off. (the bios is set to do a clean shutdown when you hit the power switch so even that is disabled). Restart and carries on fine. Note that the quick launch toolbar is always "off" afterwards....

Most often when doing stuff like scrolling through the monitor windows in Premiere or Encore, I'm used to those packages so I tend to use them mainly. I have had the occasional one when playing a clip in Winamp as well. Mainly editing right now hence the problems.

Could be software, seems more like hardware to me. I have swapped out the graphics card and flipped the two DIMMs around and popped them into the other 2 slots for good measure with no obvious change. Don't have any spare ones unfortunately.

Spec:
Windows XPSP2
ABIT AI7 mobo, P4 3.0GHz
2x 512MB RAM Crucial DDR300 PC3200
Sapphire 9550 ATi Radeon
120GB Maxtor IDE main disk
80GB IBM IDE backup disk
120GB Samsung SATA disk for capture & editing
Winfast TV card
Canopus AVDC-100

Could be temperature related too, though the CPU is sitting at 55 which ain't that hot, and it's an airy box stacked with 2 fans front and rear.

Right now I just have to save a lot. I'm going to overclock the thing next to see if I can really screw it up hehehe )

Any thoughts welcome ....

botanic

[808smokey]

Have you tries the memory only one stick at a time?

That might be worth a try??

[botanic]

I had thought about it. I'll do that next, thanks. It would save buying any more RAM meantime.

Then I might consider a different brand of graphics card since the two I tried were both Sapphire ATi ones.

THe most recent hang was (wow) when I simply clicked the little icon to flip from full screen mode to window mode.

botanic