I think it's kind of strange that these problems have appeared out of nowhere, assuming your mother hasn't upgraded drivers and software while using the system. These out-of-nowhere problems always indicate some kind of trouble with the hardware, so you should first do a generic hardware check. That means: harddrive, cpu, chipset, ram, video card
What you shouldn't do: reinstall the system
It won't work when one of components I stated above is faulty. You will have the same problem again, or it will come again in the next weeks. That means another reinstall and so on, it only costs time and does nothing.
Get yourself some recent LiveCD that includes system check tools. Something like a Knoppix disc or else. Most of these discs include a memtest86 image. Use it for checking your memory (it will also check the chipset if your RAM is not accessed by the CPU itself).
Then use something like cpuburn for CPU stress testing. cpuburn should also include burnBX and burnMMX which are very good for combined memory and chipset checking. badblocks can check you harddisc for errors (only use the read-only mode if you don't want to damage your data, OR the safe write-read mode).
If that works you can reinstall Win and test 3D acceleration there. 3Dmark should do it.
Additional Spam:
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- The DVD/CD drives drivers need updating
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There are no 'special' drivers for optical drives. Only one generic driver which wasn't updated in quite some time.
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- You need to install ASPI drivers
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Don't do it. All recent tools use SPTI to send SCSI commands to the drives. You should only install some ASPI driver if your application really depends on it.
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- You need to enable DMA mode
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It is in fact better to enable DMA because it takes work from the CPU. But if PIO-mode crashes the system then something else is wrong. And you should first check that before switching to DMA. That would be ignoring the real problem....
Shouldn't affect the system. Can slow down extraction or make it impossible but nothing more.
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- The DVD/CD drive's IDE cable is bad
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Could be indeed a problem. Confuses the interface and maybe the driver can't cope with that.
Generates a warning message that Windows is expanding the swap.
Jam it back in, in the dark.
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