Laptop Crashing Problem 1

[BlackEvo]

I have my girlfriend's laptop. She has been having some problems with it crashing. Its a Dell Inspiron 8100 with 256 megs of ram, a 1.0 ghz processor with Intel(r) III mobile chipset(not sure the number). It had Windows ME on it and i upgraded it to Windows XP. On the ME OS when watching a DVD the computer would crash about 5-15 minutes in. I decided to put XP on it and run a movie and it worked fine. I noticed that her Ethernet card is a piece of crap (dongle) and when I is inserted into the computer the MHZ drops from 996 to 727. When installing the Microsoft Service Packs it crashes; it periodically crashes when browsing the web; it crashes when playing music (usually 5-30 minutes); it doesn't crash when its idle or im ripping mp3s, but it did crash as i was organizing Music Match Juke Box files. I defragged it...

Would a clean install remedy this situation? or should i open the computer up and make sure everything is in place, or is it driver issues?

 

[wolluf]

A clean install might remedy situation - its difficult to tell from description what's wrong.