How to tell what caused Win XP to freeze!

[scammey]

I have been having problems with Windows XP freezing at various times. The only way to get out of it is to manually press the reset button. Sometimes (after 10 minutes or so), the machine will reboot by itself.

Is there a way to tell what caused the freeze-up. I suspect it is my video Card (Asus V7700 - Geforce 2 GTS). There are times where I get an error saying that a device failure has occurred and it indicates its the video card. This is rare. Most of the time it just freezes as decribed above.

I have the latest drivers

 

[Snickle]

I'd suspicion heat in the computer, maybe even the video card heating up. Check the fans, blow out the dust [do it outside the building]. The nice part of WinXP is that a program freezing up will seldom require rebooting the computer, just using Task Manager to close the program works.

 

[Snickle]

Forgot to mention that a weak power supply will cause heat to build up, WinXP makes things work harder.

 

[scammey]

Berton,

Thanks for the reply. The case on my computer has been open. I have recently cleared the dust off the fans on the CPU and video card. It actually seemed to get worse after the cleaning. I can't tell if the power supply is runnig hot. It is a 350W power supply. I'm not sure what else I could try.

When the computer locks up I am unable to get to the task manager to close it. I have to press the reset button to re-boot.

Any ideas?

Thanks

 

[smah]

Have you checked event viewer for any errors at the time of the freeze? Start, Run, eventvwr.msc

 

[scammey]

smah,

Yeah, the event viewer did not capture anything. I recently used a registry cleaner program. I'll see if that helps any.