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COMPUTER HANGS AT ANY TIME

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by nikhil4793

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Hi, I got Celeron 1.1 processor, 810ET motherboard, 128 MB RAM pc. It hangs at any time whenever it wants. I have tried formatting whole hard disk even then it hung. I installed fresh Win-XP SP2 in it, immediately after that my PC hung. Even when there is just 1 Word file is opened it hangs. Sometimes it does not hang even after opening 7 files.
It crap! I dont understand y is it happening.
Please help me out it this.

7 replies

by coz

I'd be interested in any responses to this question as well. I've got an AMD64 CPU, 2GB of RAM, Win XP SP2, and now I can't seem to have an application running for 5 minutes without the system hanging. At first it seemed local to just a couple of apps (iTunes, Picasa, AVG Free Edition), but it seems worse than that now.

I don't know if the details of the hang help, but I can still see my cursor, and can still even come back from screen saver, but I can't click on anything, and CTRL-ALT-DEL doesn't do anything, either. I have to reboot manually, and it doesn't create any minidump file or anything.

I've run CHKDSK, I've run Spybot and AVG Anti-Spyware, I've tried defragging, but that tends to get stuck, too.

Lately, it's also been losing my Quick Launch toolbar when I come back up. Don't know what that's all about.

I've updated video drivers, replaced a CD drive that seemed to be mostly dead, uninstalled and reinstalled programs that seemed to have problems, removed Google Desktop in case that was a factor. None of it has worked, although the video driver update seemed to fix a problem I was having with audio playback.

I've been reluctant to reinstall XP because if that doesn't work, then I have to admit total defeat. Any guidance here would be very, very helpful, as I'm way past my expertise here.

by nash.saldanha

Check that the speed of the ram is the same. This could also pose a problem as different speeds always cause an issue.Ensure the processor fan is working and if your bios supports hardware temp monitoring, put it up onto the forums as to what the temperature stands to

Cheers

by coz

How would I best diagnose the RAM speed and heat questions? I did add a second 1GB stick of RAM a few months ago -- and thought I had the specs right as told to me by the manufacturer -- but the problem persisted even when I removed it. And I *think* the problems were around before I added the RAM. Would memtest catch something like this?

As for CPU temperature, I grabbed Motherboard Monitor, but it didn't have a specific listing for my motherboard (ASUS K8S-MX), so I just went with something close (K8something, I think). It's giving me case at 138 and CPU at 165. "Fan 2" is showing 1600 RPM, but there's no reading for any "Fan 1". Should there be? The default alarm setting for CPU is 158, but I'm more interested in whether or not it spikes before it hangs, so I'll keep an eye on it. Let me know if another tool would work better or if you think I've misconfigured it.

Also, when I've had fan issues before (a cable got in the way of the main fan spinning), the machine would reboot rather than hang. Are the symptoms consistent with that as a cause? And if you've got the time and/or patience to explain it, how?

Thanks for the help so far to both responders. Right now I'm still focusing on potential software problems, so I've removed System Mechanic 6 to see if that changes anything, but I haven't put the box through any real paces just yet.

by qbertstinkypatch

See if the same thing happends in Safe mode. I have seen this occur when a SD chip reader i had installed drivers went bad. disconnect it and it worked fine.

if not then i would clean up your startup with msconfig..

by joer

Make sure the processor fan is running and is not frozen. The same with the case fan(s).

by qbertstinkypatch

Once you have ruled out that overheating is not the problem. I would take a closer look at first your RAM. I would swap out the RAM with a different memory module in the same slot and reboot. if fails, try to rule out a problem with the slot and use a different one or double it say too 512 or a gig.

The next thing I would try is see if your BIOS has an IDE test to rule out that your HD is not shot. I have seen a similar issue where the system would freeze with everything I did, come to find out the HD had bad sectors but would take an install of XP. If it checks out then try to boot from the system disk then go to the C:\ and do chkdsk /r

Thanx!

by coz

Your post reminded me of one more variable in play here. I *had* a bad HD on this machine -- a couple of bad sectors in important places, as near as I can tell -- and I ended up cloning the drive and swapping it out. So my limited knowledge of how all this works makes me think that an "imperfect" copy of some OS files could be the culprit. Does that sound like it might manifest itself with these symptoms?

Because of the RAID drivers, I haven't been able to make a Windows installation drive with the "repair" option, so this would necessitate that complete reinstall of the OS, but it would also give me a little more confidence that the reinstall would actually take.

Thanks again for the help.

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