Hello,
I found the problem for my weird lock up’s. Dam processor! Yep I changed processor and my computer has been fine. So which one do I get. I play games and back up a lot of movies. I was more to the northwood core but for just a few bucks more I can get a 3.4E
Dude, E (as in EE --> Extreme Edition) is not a few bucks more, it’s a few hundreds more… or do you mean somthing else? Go with a plain 3.0Ghz (Prescott/Northwood (if you can get a Northwood at the same price) core) and you’ll be fine.
//Danne
The P4 3.4E is not the same as the 3.4EE…definitely go for the 3.4E if the price is almost the same.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=1965&p=6
This shows a comparison of a 3.2C vs 3.2E (also 3.2EE included). The Northwood core © seems to be just slightly faster than the Prescott core (E) at lower speeds, but as clockspeed increases, the Northwood loses its advantage. Anandtech actually end up recommending the 3.2E…so if you can get a 3.4E for little extra cost, that would be my choice. 
Of particular interest to you might be that the Prescott core was actually faster at encoding than both the Northwood core AND the Extreme Edition. 
Dump the INTEL system you are using and go with an AMD athlon 64 939 or 754 chipset. The start up and shut down alone is worth the switch.
With my config in my sig, I was able to load Win XP w/ SP2 in less than 14 minutes fully updated and surfing the web.
Trust me it will be the best money you ever spent, and the AMD systems outbench mark the Intel systems using 3dbenchmark2003 very easily.