my ram seems to be badly damaged. whenever i boot up my pc everything works fine for about 10 minutes, then it makes a spluttering coughing-type sound, and that's when it all kicks off. my curser stutters across the screen in a stop-start motion, then locks up and crashes. i have tried all suggestions in windows help, used all ant-virus guff, a system restore and even the dreaded total recovery disk, wiping all i had before.

the same thing happens though!

on occasion my diskdrive will go 'awol' from my control panel, so am unable to use it whatsoever. almost as though it uninstalls itself, but doesn't.

anyone experienced/heard of a similar problem?

If your PC makes any kind of noise, I'm not sure RAM would be the cause!
Does the noise come from the PC case or the speakers? If it's from the speakers, it may be that your soundcard is dying - if it's an add-in soundcard, try removing it to see if that helps.

If the noise comes from the case (more than likely), I can think of two causes:
The hard drive is dying - this wouild explain some of the lock-ups and the apparent disappearance of the hard drive.
The other cause is that the CPU cooler fan has died and the processor is overheating - which again will cause random lock-ups and reboots.

Hope this helps
Rgds
AndyF