Mysterious failure of a Win 98 system

[jfish1936]

System in question is 1 year old, Celeron with 256 RAM, running Win XP, with a dial-up internal modem.
It was turned on and used to play a game, then off again.
Next time on, an hour later, it gave continued 1 second beeps, and got no further. CD drawer went in and out, but there was no response to keyboard or mouse. The telephone connection to the house stopped working, too.
After many attempts to restart the computer, I pulled out its power cable and reinserted it. The computer restarted and ran perfectly!
Quickly, we plugged in a USB HDD and saved all documents, pictures, etc.

Anyone got an idea what may have caused this?

[Evad]

By the sounds of it your motherboard is starting to fail. This isn't irregular or anything like that, motherboards do die fairly frequently.

How do I know that?

You said that your PC was making a beeping noise continually?

Basically in order to help people / comp. techs out motherboards are made with a basic system whereby if anything goes wrong then it will start beeping... There are different beeping patterns and they each mean different things...

What kind of motherboard is in the PC? Because the beeping is unique to different companies. If you have your motherboard manual you can look the beeping up or alternatively if you tell me I will look it up for you...