Computer Locks Up

[Guest_imported]

My computer randomly locks up so that my only recourse is to power it down. When this happens it doesn't bluescreen or anything - the screen displays what I was working on but the keyboard or mouse have no effect and I must power down and reboot.

I have had this computer (home built) for a couple of years and have not had this problem. I loaded Windows XP about 6 months ago and it was working fine up until 2 weeks ago.

After a week of fighting this I finally broke down and reformatted my main drive C: and reloaded XP and all my programs. It continued to happen leading me to believe it is a hardware issue.

My system is comprised of a Soyo SY-K7VTA motherboard with the VIA chipset, AMD Athalon 800 MHZ CPU, 448MB RAM, 3 hard drives (15GB, 20GB, 80GB) and a Vivastar DVD-RAM drive, a NIC, ATI Xpert2000 AGP video card and an ADS Pyro Firewire card, all running Windows XP Pro.

Below is the system information:

OS Name Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Version 5.1.2600 Build 2600
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Manufacturer VIA Technologies, Inc.
System Model VT8363
System Type X86-based PC
Processor x86 Family 6 Model 3 Stepping 0 AuthenticAMD ~799 Mhz
BIOS Version/Date Award Software International, Inc. 6.00 PG, 11/7/2000
SMBIOS Version 2.2
Windows Directory C:\WINDOWS
System Directory C:\WINDOWS\System32
Boot Device \Device\HarddiskVolume1
Locale United States
Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "5.1.2600.0 (xpclient.010817-1148)"
Time Zone Eastern Daylight Time
Total Physical Memory 448.00 MB
Available Physical Memory 262.82 MB
Total Virtual Memory 1.47 GB
Available Virtual Memory 1.18 GB
Page File Space 1.03 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys


Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

[666cartman]

does the problem only occur while using WinXP ?
In other words after reinstalling xp have you tried another os ?

 

[Guest_imported]

I haven't loaded any other OS than XP. Like I said though, it was working fine with XP for about 6 months before this started happening.

 

[ryan99]

Sounds to me like it may be overheating. Have you checked all the fans, especially the CPU fan. I'm sure your BIOS has a temp indicator as well.