I've ran Pentium 4 Northwood big tower on 200W back in the day, with some medium range GPUs not that power hungry, but 200W was ok.

Recently, picoPSU 160 to install a Q6600 board or a Prescott 3.2GHz board..no problems.

Knoppix does not touch the HDD the way Windows installation does. I'd just try to install Windows 2000 to see how it goes.

Have you tried a different IDE cable? I've had issues before and it turned out to be because the IDE cable was dodgy. Replaced the cable and all was good after that.

_StIwY_ wrote on 2025-01-14, 11:49:

leonardo wrote on 2025-01-14, 11:38:

Soo... how exactly did you disable ACPI (from your first post)? Did you do it in BIOS or did you launch Windows installation with setup /p i ? ...or both?

Also, for some hardware, you have to reverse the Plug&Play compatible OS setting for the best outcome, and no - it's not reliably Enabled/Disabled. My favorite case so far is one where I have to start the setup with the setting on, then turn it off once in Windows to allow all the hardware to operate well.

My friend, what you are experiencing is what we all used to live thru in the 90's: It should work, but it does not, WHY DOES IT NOT WORK?! Ahhh.. the "good" old days. 😉

...
Plug&Play compatible OS, afaik it's better to leave it Enabled on Win95 and onwards, right? But i'll try to disable it....in the meanwhile, i'll try to use the PC regularly and see what happens

So here is an example case (kind of like yours in some ways, but not really) where I actually have to leave Plug&Play-compatible OS disabled for optimal results. In my case it's also a VIA chipset, but instead of Win98SE I'm running 95 OSR2. The problem wasn't random crashes, but the OS hanging really long during shutdown (appears crashed). I had to jump thru hoops until I finally figured out how to get everything working 100%.

The reason I'm sharing this is that the solution could be really counter-intuitive and there is a certain degree of ... live, die, repeat that you'll probably have to do to figure out what's going on...

I would try Windows 2000 or Windows XP and use the system for a week or two - both for regular use and run benchmarks / stress tests from time to time.
My personal experience is that sometimes benchmarks & stress tests won't trigger a faulty hardware to act up. Yet regular "on/off" and intermittent use can. So that's why I suggest to use the system with one of the above OSes to see how that goes. If nothing crops up in a week or two or more in using the system, I'd say it's a Windows 9x issue, possibly either something with the installation itself or the drivers used for it.

As for the PSU, I agree with zb10948 above - 150 Watts should be plenty of power for your system, provided it's a good quality PSU. Most Pentium 3 systems rarely pull more than 40-50 Watts from the wall with a "basic" GPU like GeForce2 MX 420/440/460 or Radeon 7000/7200 (yes, I've measured a lot of my systems and was always surprised how efficient P3 is.) With Pentium II, the power jumps up a bit, but not much - generally somewhere in the 50-60 Watts tops under load. Most of this is from the 5V rail... but even then, that's like 10-12 Amps tops. So if your PSU is capable of providing that much and it's a known decent brand, then it should be fine.

To anyone who thinks you need a 200-300 Watt PSU minimum for a P2/P3/early P4 system: buy yourself a Kill-A-Watt meter or similar equivalent wall power meter (that can measure the real power usage), and you will see how much each of these actually use (hint: not as much as you might think. 😉 )

Hello, thanks again. I had no time these days, i'll keep you updated.