PC keeps hanging or crashing

[afcwomble]

Hi guys-I have a problem with my home desktop which has gotten worse since I done a re-install of windows. The story goes that it kept on hanging and freezing over the past month or so and then I got the dreaded clicking drive-I just put it down to a dodgy drive and carried on although a reboot was necessary 2-3 times a day. Anyway the inevitable happened and my drive died-I have 1 x 80gb and 1 x 120gb drives in the machine so I transferred what I wanted to keep off the 2nd 80gb drive and re-installed windows on it. Seemed all was going OK until it crashed again on install so done it again. Got to the stage now where I have got windows to load and updated to SP2 although it took reboot after reboot to get it to go all the way. At some stages I kept getting pop ups for registry cleaners etc.. so installed Panda Antivirus which i've been running for ages on this machine with no problems on scans-this time it finds infections in system files. I've tried and tried 40 or 50 times now to reboot and now can sometimes get to the windows screen but as soon as I try to open anything like a CD or explorer page it freezes-on a reboot it mostly takes me to the BIOS setup where I press F10 and sometimes it carries on to boot as above and others nothing. I have tried the drive on my other computer in a caddy and it pick it up fine and I can read/write to it no problem. I've even tried a 40gb hard drive from an old computer which i've used for back ups and that is the same. I have tried to search problems and it looked like my graphics card was playing up from what I read so I went out and bought another yesterday(GeForce 6200 VGA) and changed it and still the same. I have an ASUS A7V8X motherboard with an AMD Athalon [TM] XP 2600+ 2.08Ghz and 768MB of RAM.

Any ideas on what the problem could be? Thanks in advance.

 

[The Dentist]

Seems like it could be either faulty ram causing your computer to hang. to test this...(you more than like have a 256 and 512) take one stick of ram out and turn computer on. if that dont help, put it back in and take the other stick out. see if that helps.

also, while you're at it, give your fan a clean and so on.
if that fails, check that your processor has good air to it. ie, air not blocked and has it got good thermal paste on it.
also, is your processor overclocked?

XP 2600 @ 2.08GHz

sounds overclocked to me.

you can try stepping the clock settings down a bit on bios.

 

[notmeatall3]

Sorry devil but athlon XP 2600+ runs at 2.08GHz.

At 1st glance it would appear that problem is hardware based.

Thats sound advice from Devil follow it.

If that doesn't work try taking out any pci cards and all hdd's except ure boot drive.

I advise following the tutorial on the unattended install (search in google) and slipstream SP2 and all the updates into your copy of windows. That way when u reinstall u will have Windows Firewall installed before u need expose ure computer to the internet. You can install a better firewall later.

Then install ure computer with just drivers and updates (no external progs) and see if that helps. If it ok then install one progam at a time and reboot everytime just incase it is a software based problem.

 

[afcwomble]

Thanks for replies guys-been trying those solutions with no luck so far-I have a 512MB and 2x 128MB of RAm and tried with just the 512 and the 128 on their own and still the same. Removed all PC cards, had a Hauppage TV Tuner, Lan card , RAID card and Modem card and just left the new graphics card and no go. I also find that when I get into the windows page(this happens 1 in every 5 or 6 tries) and then go to say start a CD I get alot of interference on the screen then it freezes. I've air blown the whole kabush out so spotlessly clean inside and i've removed the processor and blew that clean as well-only thing is when I put the heatsink back in I have no paste-does this play a big part or is it OK without? I'm going to pull another drive from my daughters old PC-think its a 20GB to try another reload of Windows in the mean time in case I have 2 faulty drives but i'd be surprised as they work in a caddy. Anything else I could try? Thanks.

 

[chrisistheking]

could possibly be a over heating problem with ur cpu. Clean off the old thermal past and apply a thin even layer of some fresh paste.

If this doesnt help look at the capacitors on your motherboard (the can shaped things) and see if any have a domed top or look swolen. You may need to replace them or buy a new motherboard.

Hope this helps

Chris

 

[conor-mr2]

Potentially the power supply unit isnt powerful enough to handle the requirements.

I had one of these recently happen to a friend in work. It caused the hard drive to freeze intermittantly. We thought it was the graphics card going bad but after looking we found that the atx connector to the mobo was fused and then shorted the board.

PSU was at fault for not having enough juice to run the system.

 

[afcwomble]

Cheers for further replies guys-I've cheched all the caps and all seem OK-I can now boot up most of the time so getting a bit better-I'm booting with no discs in CD drives. Soon as I try to boot a CD it locks again so maybe it is the power supply? Although it's a 400w supply and only about 1 1/2 years old as I remember replacing it. Going to try and get hold of another power supply at the weekend to try anyway. I'll update then. Thanks

 

[conor-mr2]

Hehe well if its gor SLI cards (dulaers or anything like that) you're gonna need more than that!

Oh what happened to the old days of 200watt psus. I miss my 286 with 20mb hard drive and 5.25 inch floppy drive

 

[digicol]

If it is locking up when you are using the optical drive it might be a dodgy ribbon cable. Stranger things have happened. Make sure it is fully connected, if so try changing it, borrow one from another PC if you have to.

Or it could be a dodgy DVD drive. Not sure how it would force a lock up though.

If not then try another PSU, again borrow one from another PC to test first, if all is well then it's the PSU.

Oh and yes you need paste on your CPU, if not once you start using your computer for anything other than browsing you are almost certainly going to hit critical temps.