It's more of an amd problem than a pentium.
1)on an amd k6-2 350 it locks up
2)pent pro 75 never locks up
3)amd k6-2 350 with over 128 meg of ram locks up
4)pent pro 75 with over 128 meg of ram never lcoks up.
At work i did tests on 35 of the Dell's not one of them failed and i did 4 tests on each. all pentiums. If anything it's a Windows problem, 3dnow patch is missing, memory problem, driver db is corrubt etc.
If you reall are mad at it reformat and reinstall everything, and get direct x 6.0