so..you have to hard reset...hm..is it one stick of ddr or two you have?
(i have recently sorted my own hardlock on internet games..turnes out one of my mem sticks was on the way out, and my machine didnt like it when coupled with the newer stick.)
if you have 2 512 sticks, try taking one out for a while, specialy the older of the two if they were bought seperately.
(yeah, i know, its not nice now to play games with less than a gig, but its mainly for testing purposes and it *can* be done :0 hehe just not as good as a gig)
also, do you use Xp or Vista?
(since everyone is usually on one or the other, though im now on 2k since i had to go up from 98 for my networking to games to work properly now...its usually helpfull to add not only the spec of the PC but the operating system too, since some bugs are vista related, like no sound
)
athlon, hm....2500..you might wanna check the prosessor fan too, just in case
i remember some of the athlon chips were getting hoter than they were supposed to (unless is a amd64 type) so its always a good idea to make sure the heatsinc is fluff free....
i got 16degrees of heat difference once from just that..it stoped the machine from needing to be whiped from reseting itself, and the boss had even sugested it was the mainbord, the chip, the mem..(he does so love to blame it on virus, then hardware....)
plus, the customer was happier, since it was just a PC-Check fee and no whipe-reinstall fee and no data was lost....and they brought it back regularly after that every six months for a checkup *deeFluff*
