System locks up followed by contiuous beep

[crazyray]

I'm running a dual processor system with an Acorp 6A815EPD mobo (Award BIOS), a pair of PIII 1 gig CPU's, and the maximum supported RAM (512 MB SDRAM). I am not overclocking. This has been a great rock stable system for some time now. Today it started locking up periodically; shortly after it locked a continuos beep would sound and I would shut down manually.

The continuous beep I associate with an overheated CPU, so I opened the case and observed the CPU fans; both worked normally as did the case fans. I then installed a hardware monitor which showed normal CPU temps of ~37 to 40 degrees. There was no collection of dust or reason to believe the heasinks had been installed incorrectly. (As i noted, I'd been running like this for months).

I swapped out the RAM for some spares I had. There have been NO problems now for several hours....does this make any sense?

Thanks to all the PC pros out there for any helpful comments.

[Wizzard~Of~Ozz]

Ram does go bad, I have 2 sticks of crucial that started randomly rebooting my PC, after the first reboot, only 1/2 of the stick showed, and it was very flakey at best. replaced one under warranty, the other was replaced with generic because it was cheaper then their warranty. (taxes and duties because they WON'T mark their packages with RMA#'s!!)