Oh, one other thing: when my hard drive was in the early stages of failing I noticed that it acted better cold than warm. In an attempt to monitor its temperature I downloaded a program called SpeedFan that's designed to detect the presence of temperature sensors in the computer and take a shot at reading what temperatures they show. It seemed to be pretty well behaved on my particular system and to give me some interesting information but I eventually reached the limits of my curiosity and stopped using it. It did take some guesswork and reasoning to use; it can tell you that a particular reading seems to represent a temp sensor but you have to figure out for yourself if the readings make sense and where the sensor might be located. It's a bit of a long shot but if you were to find that the temp sensors in your machine were or weren't going berserk, it just might help you narrow down the source of your problem.