I would check to see if your hard-drive is failing. First I would go into the BIOS to see if the mother board is recognizing the drive. If it is then I would try booting a live CD.

These two steps should give some more information on possible hardware failures.

Thank you for the advice, but I tried a live CD, and I can't get to the bios. I've tried F10 at boot-up this does nothing but show me the HP splash screen on boot-up. I removed the ram and switched banks with it and one time I got a screen that asked if I wanted to use F1 to go into setup or F2 to resume. At that time I tried F2 to resume and found out my keyboard was not working either. It's an older computer I'm sure it's breaking done but I would like to keep it around for my wife to play her card games on.

Thank you for the help hope this gives you other ideas.

I was told by a professor one semester that there is a dedicated chip on motherboards to handle the keyboard and mouse in order to save on cpu resources, but the chip still uses RAM.

So I am thinking your RAM may be defective. I would get a second opinion on that though.

Bowers,

Does your computer hangs when your WinXP reaches a welcome screen after bootup?

Without inserting WinXP CD in your CDROM, try pressing F8 button
on your keyboard when you boot your computer ,select the
Safe Mode and press "Enter". Choose WinXP.

If you are able to enter Safe Mode, then right click on "My Computer" and click on "Properties". Click on the "Hardware tab" on the top of the system properties box. Than click on "Device Manager". Just go through the list of the hardware devices and let me know if you see an "Exclamation" point on any of the devices.