Help diagnosing computer freeze

[dragonturtle]

Hello,

a few days ago my PC began freezing randomly. I'd be doing something (gaming, surfing, opening folders) then the PC would stop responding slowly... e.g. I'll click on the start menu but the menu doesn't appear, if I leave it alone at this point it will keep running, but if I try to do something else it locks up. No error messages.

The PC is a year old... a P4 2.8, Asus P4P800S, ATI 9600 Pro, 1 GB DDR400, 120 GB Maxtor. I'm not very familiar with hardware troubleshooting, but this is what I've done:

OS: reformatted and reinstalled W2K, but it still locks up. In fact, it's also locked up when booting MS-DOS from floppy so I don't think it's the OS. I have W2K running on 1 of 3 partitions, so could the partition have gone bad??? I ran a disk check but it didn't return any errors.

RAM: ran the 512 MB RAM sticks independently but it still locks up. I don't suspect the RAM unless both of them blew simultaneously.

BIOS: ran the latest update. How could the BIOS suddenly become corrupt anyway???

Power: I had Asus Probe running and it shows normal voltage just before locking up... 11.5 to 12.5 V.

Heat: Asus Probe and the motherboard utils showed normal motherboard and CPU temperatures.

Dust: I vacuumed and the tower sits on my desk, not the floor.

HD: I swapped the SATA cables and the SATA connection to the mobo but still locks. I'm suspecting the hard drive because the lockups don't happen when idle. It's SATA and I don't have another SATA HD to swap in to test my theory, unfortunately. Could HD failure cause these lockups??? I don't mind spending the $90 to try a new one, but I'd like to know if it's a possible source of my problem first.

Motherboard: I know nothing about these. I'd rather not replace it because I wouldn't know how to remove/connect the processor. Also, if it turns out it isn't the mobo, I'll have an extra piece of hardware I can't use. Could the mobo be failing???

Any tips would be appreciated.

 

[Vangola]

Its one year old I hear you say, Put the Motherboard in a box tommorow and send it back to the manufacturers appoligising for the late delivery and it is late because, you suffered it for awhile and two months ago when you tried to remove it, you realised due to your investigation that carfull was the way to go (as they They might want to examine it for their records) Well I can nearly assure you that they will replace it.
And Yes I thing its the mother board I've seen similiar occurances where I worked and most of those tools are not worth a damn anyway, not unless something, has has a really good go at your hardware.

Vangola (Dublin)

 

[cdogg]

Bad contact between the CPU and heatsink is another possibility.

It could really be anything hardware related (since you've already tried reformatting, I doubt it's any kind of infection). Make sure you disconnect all unnecessary devices like CD/DVD drives, PCI devices, etc, and only run the system with a minimal configuration.

~cdogg
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