Capturing from 4 firewire cameras, system instability

[biosol]

I've got a specialized software program that captures live video from up to 5 firewire MiniDV camcorders at the same time. I'm running across a problem of the system rebooting when the live feeds remain open for more than a minute or two. I've contacted the manufacture of software and they say they haven't had this issue before with any of the thousands of installations they've done. I have the software running on Windows XP Pro SP2 and a prescott 3.0Ghz cpu with 1GB of DDR400 RAM.

I wonder if it's a heat issue? I've dealt with overheating at full cpu on another system, but don't know if that might be it. I have 4 MiniDV cameras hooked up to 4 separate firewire cards. The cpu utilization in the task manager is in the high 90% sometime at 100%. Does having 3 or 4 cameras place a heavy load on the cpu?

One test I've done is to open some programs that peg the cpu at 100% and they ran fine for over 20 minutes, so I don't really know if the rebooting is a heat problem???

Does anyone have any suggestions or know of any other forums I could ask this question?

Thanks.

 

[kiddpete]

There's also a big problem accessing the harddrive. How many harddrives are supporting this four camera capture?

 

[biosol]

1 120GB IDE drive. Also, just to clarify, the system works/captures fine/properly, it's just when I ready to capture something if anything comes up that makes me pause for a minute, that's when the reboot happens. My work around has been to open the live feeds for a short time, and then close them if something needs to be adjusted that would delay the capture.