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PC Locking Up

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by vanderlay

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My brother has a Gateway GP6400 with a Pentium II running Windows 95. He has just recently started experiencing a problem where his PC will just "freeze" after about 6 hours of being on. I disabled the Power Mangement within the BIOS and it still locked up the PC. The one new piece of information now is that when he came back and saw the screen it was displaying the message "It is now safe to turn of your computer..." - as if it was shutdown properly. When he turns it back on it runs through Scandisk as if it was improperly shutdown. I would think this is related to "heat" but am not sure what to tell him to do next. Looking for suggestions and ideas as to what might be causing this?

Thanks in advance!!

V

17 replies

by syscokid

Good thought as to heat. To verify the diagnosis, take the cover off and check the power supply fan as well as any CPU fans. Some systems also allow you to check CPU heat in the BIOS.

Try running it with the cover off and see if the problem still occurs. If it does, it may be be something other than heat, bt I bet you'll find a nonworking fan.

by vanderlay

I tried this but it did not help the problem. It shut down as before. Any other ideas? The fan inside has a hood sitting above the CPU where it pulls air across the CPU and blows it out the back.

Thanks,

V

by chad dykstra

V,

It is probably heat - if not, you also may want to get a diagnostic utility and check the memory on the PC. That could be causing random lockups as well..

GL

Chad

by willc5

MY BEST SUGGESTIONS TO THIS TYPE OF PROBLEM IS PROBALY RO RESTORE THE COMPUTER BACK TO FACTORY SETTINGS USING THE RESTOR DISK THAT SHOULD HAVE CAME WITH PC,OR THAT COULD BE THE PROBLEM WITH THE PC GETTING TO HOT.

by bv2

Replace the fans - just because they spin or seem to be working doesn't mean they are spinning fast enough for adequate cooling. Make sure that your power management is shut off in the Control Panel as well as the BIOS. It sounds like you have oneshut off but not the other, and that one is trying to suspend to HDD but the HDD has already powered down.

by chad dykstra

V,

No, I wasn't referring to the BIOS checking the memory earlier. Get a program similar to what I use (Troubleshooter 6.54) to do a test on the ENTIRE memory, bit by bit. There are lots of programs out there that do this.

by vanderlay

Thanks for you help. I haven't had time to try this but have swapped out memory sticks and presume that this wouldn't add anything else since it still had the problem.

V

by bionicdog

Trying reseating your processor and see whether that takes care of it and also you my want to test it with a known working processor and see whether that solves the puzzle.
Good Luck

by otl

A little more info would help, but I'll take a shot.

Q: Tried disabling screen saver or change the screen saver?
Q: How much disk space is left on the hard drive? May be running out of swap space?
Q: Has the hard drive been defragged recently?
Q: Is there any hard-drive activity when it is locked up? If so;
Q: Tried turning off FastFind? While it is indexing files this will dramatically slow or stop file processing.
Q Have checked for and deleted excess .tmp files, an overflowing directory of .tmp will stop a computer trying to "ADD" another entry.

Good Luck!

by vanderlay

Good advice. I will give some of these a try. Yes it has been defragged. No hard-drive activity.

by masked man

An in depth check of the system's RAM would be a good place to start. I had a system once that behaved the same way and it turned out to be a bad stick of RAM. Even if a software test comes back ok, I would try either ram from a different pc with noproblems or start with minimal ram see if the problem goes away and then start adding ram back in 'till the problem starts back up, or perhaps reseating the ram will fix it.

On a different track try running a virus scan. They can cause really wierd behavior, above and beyond what they're designed to do.

Other things to try, in no particular order:
1. Check all connections, reseat everything.
2. Uninstall & Remove all peripherals that aren't needed to run the system, if that clears it up the start adding things back till the problem resurfaces.
3. Get the latest software drivers for all the peripherals in the system.
4. Upgrade the bios.
5. Upgrade the operating system.
6. F-Disk and reinstall everything from scratch.

Hope this helps you out.

masked man

by vanderlay

Will give 1, 2, and 3 a try. Don't want to try 4 or 6. Unable to do 5 based on software needed on the PC.

Thanks,

V

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