It's possibly starving for fuel. If it has an O.E.M. inline fuel filter, you might try replacing it with an automotive filter so you get greater capacity for storing the stuff that a fuel filter catches before becoming "stopped up". I like the clear plastic kind so you can see if it has trapped water. I think you probably have 1/4" fuel hose so getting a nice, robust filter at a local parts house or even Wal-Mart is no trouble. Pay attention to the directional arrow pointing the right way to install it. Don't worry if you see a pocket of air in the top of the filter that won't go away, that's normal and does not mean your are sucking air or anything. The reason I suggest it may not be getting enough fuel is that you say it starts well and runs well until you try to cut grass. If it isn't acting strangely otherwise, it might not be getting sufficient fuel to meet the engine's needs when the real load is handed to it. Go out there and try to mow some grass the way you did before. Do this for about 15 minutes and then cut off the engine right there (so you can read the evidence on the spark plug tips without running the engine without being loaded) Let it cool down a bit and remove the spark plugs to inspect the tips. If the tips are dark black and sooty looking, you are getting too much fuel and/or not enough air. In that case start looking for a restriction in the air induction system (air filter and check any ducting leading to the air cleaner for foreign material, like a mouse nest). If the tips of plugs are white in appearance, you are not getting enough fuel and the engine is running too lean.

So the problem does not seem to be the motherboard, you have a signal onscreen. Is the replacement motherboard identical to the one that failed? Did you simply pop the hard drive back in with the original Windows install on it? Do you have the CD that came with the newer mobo? (If not the drivers will be available online but expect slow downloads fro the Asus site if you use them) Have you tried putting the XP CD in the drawer and doing a repair to see if this will overcome the issues? Remember if you do this you will need to download and install every update and patch issued since the CD was created.

Hi, It's fairly typical to scribe the farm sink cabinets to the sink material. The only way this would be formidable would be if the doors below the sink interfered. They did on my sink install; I had to recut the doors, but since they were unfinished, no prob. Casey

Did this just start happening ? Or was it a gradual change. That would be telling. If it just started up it's probably related to one new change. In that case I would suspect an antivirus scan at startup. I've had that happen before. It's also possible to have a defragger run at startup. One way to tell that is if you open Task Manager and under the Processes tab, check the I/O Reads and I/O Writes columns. Click on the the column's heading so it shows what's highest at the top. Click again if necessary for the correct ordering. (If those columns are not showing you might have to go up to View>>Select Columns and add them in.) But if one program is doing a lot of I/O (reading and writing to disk), that'd be suspicious. Same thing with the cpu column. You'd want to look for something using a lot of cpu cycles. By the way, if you're having trouble getting Task Manager to start, use Ctrl-Alt-Del and choose Task Manager. Also in Task Manager click on the Applications tab and see if any programs are shown as "not responding". That could be something so cpu or I/O intensive that it won't even report to Task Manager. Are you positive you have enough memory ? In Task Manager, for Physical memory, what do you have for Total/Cached/Available/Free ? Next I'd suspect Startup items as aputternut suggested. This can be a little tricky to track down, but not impossible. You can download the free "Starter" program by Codestuff and click on the Startup tab, which will show you the major things set to startup at boot time. http://codestuff.obninsk.ru/products_starter.html But it's not exhaustive. If you really want the full picture, which can be a bit daunting, you can download the free RunScanner program and run it in Expert Mode. To scan, use the 3rd tab. After it completes, the 2nd tab has an "Autostart" sub-tab, showing everything that's set to auto start. But it's so detailed and comprehensive it can be hard to interpret. It's really kind of an expert level program. Nevertheless, sometimes some weird malware or virus type thing can show up there. Codestuff's Starter is much easier to use. As an aside, research has shown that defraging isn't really as much of an issue as people have thought. Nevertheless I still do it. But it's not going to cause the kind of startup problems you're having. Let us know what you find out.