Lately I've been having supreme troubles with XP. It's gotten to the point where I can predict it's freezing/crashing/restarting of it's own accord, depending on what programs are running.

I can leave it totally idle with nothing more than my anti-virus (AVG Free) and my firewall (Zone Alarm) running and it STILL freezes. If I have uTorrent open, it crashes and restarts on it's own. I have no idea why it's behaving this way. I just flashed the HD a few months ago and did a clean XP install.

The closest two plausibilities I can come up with are:

I'm dual booting Ubuntu: The OS's share the same HD, but what's causing reservations with this is that Windows was behaving like this before I reinstalled the most recent time...before I ever had Linux on this machine. The only difference is now it's hit an extreme.

My CPU is getting on in years/has been in several builds...point is, it's starting to wear out: This seemed logical, but I don't know if it's totally plausible/cause for such behaviour because the compy doesn't really crash in Linux. If it were the CPU, technically it would behave the same no matter what OS...right?

I'm at a total loss for what to do. If I could get audio working in Linux I'd be done with XP in a heartbeat.