Its seems i may have some hardware problems with my old house PC.
Before i bin it, are there any diagnostic programs i can run to find out if its a major component problem or a smaller one cheap to replace?

what are your symptoms?

... and how old is the PC? If it's too old then it might not be worth repairing, expecially when a PC can be bought so cheap.

[Edited on 15/11/07 by Mag1caltrev0r]

Yes its old but its the one the kids abuse all the time,
1Ghz processor, 764Mb ram 70 Gb hard, XP.
I do have access to some spare parts.
But with the dishwasher gone bang, an overtime ban, tyre's needed for the kit, the VR6 Galaxy blowing smoke, the missis off long term sick and 4 yes thats 4 teenagers in the house i am now suffering with allocation of funds.

Symptoms are, generally very slow but freezes up at any time. Windows fault report came back with possible hardware problems. Many times the computer reports a criticle error and needs to shut down.

[Edited on 15/11/07 by snapper]

Have you tried giving it a good clean? Whip it all apart and hoover out all the dust it'll have collected, paying particular attention to getting all of the cradge out of the fans and heatsink fins.

After that I'd do a bit of hard disk maintenance: defrag it, and run a disk check to make sure it's not got too many errors on it.