Vista freezing at odd times

"the voltage was low so i bumped it up to 2.1 which is what is printed on the side of the RAM,"

Good moves. The timing is one I might have left alone since the old setting was slower and I tend to make one change at a time.

Don't flash the BIOS except when we have no choice.
Bob

So i moved the GeForce 7600GT to a different PCI slot, just sort of on a hunch, and the pc has been on and working just fine for about 8 hours now which is great!

it is a LITTLE on the sluggish side, you think maybe i should set the ram back to 5-5-5-15?

so i just talked to my parents and since i have been in colorado their computer has frozen twice. my mother said that twice it has booted up at the wrong resolution (800x600)

I sent her a link to update her video card drivers...but other than that im at a loss of what to do.

Can you deal with it's maker to have them fix it?

If self-built then you start the process of changing parts.

Again, since more than one OS locks up it's likely to be hardware related or even design related. For example I found one machine where they put a quad core 1000 Watt system in a mini-case. It didn't run for very long until it locked up.
Bob

based on the specs any idea of where to start replacing hardware? it seems like the power supply should be giving out enough juice, im just worried its a motherboard thing and i don't want to replace a bunch of parts and find out its some setting on the motherboard or something like that. heard of any dfi boards having problems with ocz memory?

not sure what you mean by design, as far as the case...its in an antec three-hundred but the desk its in has a compartment for the pc with a door. i drilled a bunch of holes in the door to help get some air in, and it doesn't seem to be overheating, air coming out of all the exhaust fans is cool, unfortunately, speedfan and any other temp monitoring software ive tried has given odd readings, like 15 degrees F core temp, obviously thats not correct.

it just seems odd that suddenly, after many months of smooth operation that it would just start locking up like that, but like i said, i've tested the memory, its clearly not a hard drive issue, i wouldn't really suspect the cpu, but i suppose it could be having problems, checked the graphics card and all the pci cards, and i don't think that it is overheating at all....so where would you recommend i start?

Since parts age and fail the rough part of this story is to find out what is giving the machine grief. If it wasn't for the fact that both Vista and 7 were having the issue then I would be writing about an OS reload.

Then again you might have a printer, usb or other item that is giving the OS fits. I start with removing what I can do without.
Bob

For that machine (some "ICEBOX"?) I found that the BIOS settings for USB KEYBOARD and MOUSE support only worked if I had it set EXACTLY as follows:

USB Keyboard - Enabled.
USB Mouse - Disabled.
USB 2.0/1.1 support = Enabled.

Your magic combo may differ but you tell me why it mattered.
Bob