Upgrade to fix reboot problem

Currantly I have an Athlon 2100 running on an FIC board with a gig of
ram and a cheap 300 watt power supply. I do a lot of video editing and
have 4 internal 120 gig drives, two of which are configured in a raid
0 array using the MB's onboard Promise raid. I'm running WinXP Home.

Over the last month or so I've had problems with spontaneous
shutdowns and reboots. At first these occurances were infrequent
and actually stopped for about 3 weeks. But they are back and bad,
happening every few minutes on those few occasoions when the boot
sequence completes. Error messages are varied and range from blue
screens early in the boot process ( these are rare and include 8 E &
C2) , to the "windows has recovered from a serious error" message with
reference to minidump problems.

I know this could be software related, but I don't think so.I rewrote
the C Drive with an image file from 3 months before the problem
started. That should have eliminated a registry problem, virus, etc.,
but the problem continued. Norton A/V and Spybot S&D have found
nothing I think it's more likely hardware and could be heat, ram,
power supply, a short somewhere, or a failing component. I tried
running memtest from a boot floppy, but after working fine for two or
three minutes, the screen starts scrolling very rapidly in a diagonal
direction and can't be read. This scrolling had happened on reboots
for at least the past year, but wasn't a problem because it stopped as
soon as windows finished loading.

When I opened the case I found that there actually were components
buried in the dust and hidden under the tangle of cables. I'll clean
it first and try securing the cables out of the way. I have two sticks
of ram so next I'll pull one, then the other to see if one is bad.
But after that I may just go to Plan B.

I planned on adding a new pretty high-end computer to become my main
machine in 6 or 9 months. I can't afford to do that until then. I
planned on using my currant machine mainly for file storage and
back-up. Now I think I may upgrade my currant machine modestly to buy
time until I can afford my new machine, and at the same time get rid
of the reboot problem. I would get a new MB, a processor in the
3000-3200 range, ram, power supply, and mid-level video card. This
rebuilt machine would still be used mainly for file storage
eventually, but in the meantime it would be my main machine and allow
me to put off getting my high-end machine for a while longer.

If I do this, I worry about the files on the Raid 0 drives. While most
of them are backed up to an external drive, there are several of the
latest edits which didn't get backed up because of the crashes. I
would prefer to not lose them. If my new MB has onboard promise raid,
will I be able to read them ? What about an add-in raid card?

Any suggestions for fixing the reboot problem?

For Plan B:
Will it work if the problem is hardware?
What if it's software?
Will I need to do an XP Repair?
What about the Raid issue?
Any suggestions for components?

Dave W.