Finally fixed!

Well it's taken a couple of weeks, but at last looseheads machine is back up and running in a stable state.
My original suggestion of replacing the PSU wasn't the solution unfortunately, so he's a little more out of pocket than intended, however it's a decent 480W PSU so if he does decide to upgrade it should be sufficient.
The source of the problem seems to have been a 5 year old IBM deskstar HDD. He was running on a 30GB HDD as for some reason i couldn't get the slave drive working alongside it originally. And it seems the issue is with the drive. However i still can't actually discover what the drive problem was... other than to describe the fault.

Intermittent "Freezing" at any point, when loading files, booting or basically doing things that accessed the HDD. Often the case "speaker" would let out a few warbles and beeps intermittently. However the strange thing is that sometimes the drive would run for anything between 1minute and 12 hours. That's partly why i thought it was a PSU issue, something voltage related.

I had the new drive up and running between 7pm Friday - 4pm Saturday afternoon without any issues. Hopefully that'll keep up and he wont have any further issues.

On a similar note, i'm thinking it's probably about time i formatted this machine again. It's been around 9 months since i got this machine up and running, and whilst i've not really noticed any significant performance drops there is some noticeable slowdown. To try and compensate for that i've been running spyware, registry and defrag utils on a weekly basis, which do appear to have improved the situation slightly.. but there's nothing quite like a fresh install to cheer a person up.

Perhaps i'll hold off until November or December and pick up one of the last dual core socket 939 chips, a slight upgrate to take me into the new year.. :) Not sure if the Dual core will make a big difference but at least it'll put me in a position whereby the next upgrade will have to be a big one (replacement gfx card for switch over to PCI-E) mobo, chip and ram. perhaps i'll go for an Intel chip next time, i've ben running an AMD variant for the last 6 years or so, i fancy a change.