I have an Inspiron 5000e that I rescued from salvage. It is a ~700 MHz PIII that the time had only a 5GB HD & 128MB of memory.  I swapped out the HD for an 80GB (of which I can actually use about 68GB) & bumped the memory to 384MB. Other than being slow, it has done pretty much everything I have needed it to do.  Which is not bad for a $100 investment. 

 

Now to the problem. At random times the system will just turn off. It won't go into shutdown or anything like that, it just stops.  It can be running for days or 5 minutes. It can have several programs or none running. 

 

Please, any ideas would be welcome (except buy a new one or throw away as I am very broke).

 

Thanks in advance. --Trader88