Computer Woes

I know just enough about the inner workings of computers to be dangerous. My desk top computer has been crashing fairly often, but while I was gone to camp it got a lot worse. It never recovered from the video Cathy tried to view on the MSNBC site. After trying a variety of online fixes, I'd decided to re-format the hard drive and start over. Thing is, the computer is crashing every time I try to reinstall Windows XP! Maybe it's a hardware thing? I've been surfing the net for cheap motherboards. I suppose I could just wave the white flag and trash the thing. It seems like a waste of good (?) parts. There will undoubtedly be more to this story.