first thing you want to do is stop your computer from automatically rebooting without telling you what's wrong. go into Control Panel > System > Advanced > Startup and Recovery Settings and uncheck the box that says automatically restart under system failure. now instead of Windows automatically rebooting on you when somethings goes wrong you'll get a blue error screen. you'll still have to manually reboot your PC but by looking at what the error says you can figure out exactly what's causing the problem
most common reasons for hard locking like that though are memory, overheating, or video card issues. it can be a bad piece of hardware that you have to replace or it could be something as simple as drivers. i've seen pretty much every type of error that WinXP can throw at you so if you post the error details here i or others here should be able to tell you what's causing it
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