HELP! Hardware error - MS Knowledge Base 329284

[858diver]

I have a home-made Celeron 1.7 GB machine, running Windows XP flawlessly for about 9 months. For the past few days, the machine seems to be a bit sluggish. I ran some system maintenance, but ran in to difficulties when attempting to defragment the hard drive (twice). The system would freeze, reboot, XP would run some type of maintenance, then open windows.
After the second occurrence, the following error was reported:
Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 329284 STOP: 0x0000009C (0x00000004, 0x00000000, 0xb2000000, 0x00020151)
"MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION"
Unfortunately, there is not sufficient information to continue.
The good news is that all of the major hardware items (mobo, CPU, memory, HDD) are all less than one year old - the challenge is to figure out the culprit, and return it for warranty replacement while I still can.

Suggestions, please?

 

[terminalmind]

I would use memtest86 to test the memory and test the Hard Drive using the utility that came with your hard drive.
That would at least narrow it down.

I assume you are not overclocking anything.