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XP mystery crash

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by scot

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I've got a machine that benches incredibly well. But whenever it goes back to the client, it all of a sudden crashes and corrupts the hard drive. if you take out the drive and run a check disk and put it back in, it runs great for a few more hours. We've replaced EVRYTHING but it still does the exact same thing. There are zero errors in the event viewer as well, and the blue screen is just a generic stop error. no codes or anything.

it's a gigabyte ga-p35-s3g with a core2duo, 2gb ram on xp pro (sp 2 and 3 do the same thing).

if anybody has any insight that would be awesome.

thanks

5 replies

by shhite

We had a problem with one of our drivers who kept trashing the hard drive and os on his laptop and could not figure out what the problem was. We would fix the problems and computer would work fine and then as soon as he got it back in his possession and took it home it would crash again. Come to find out he had a gold separator that was creating an emi field that was crashing our computer. Ask the hard questions and find out what kind of equipment is around the computer. If it is not in their office find out what kind of businesses are around them.

Hope this helps.

by jiminpa

Perhaps the client has low or noisey power. Although the PC PS should filter it it maybe worth a look also it may be good to travel to the customer site and observe the machine before it crashes. Could be a sequence of events that lead to the crash.

by Former member

Get a power surge protector for this customer and see if the computer is stable. If not then it could be the processor, but since you most probably have changed this as well it would seam very unlikely. So the most common causes are:
1). Power spikes
2). Power supply not powerful enough.(Though
unlikely).
3). Too much Heat being generated.(or not
enough air being circulated).
4). Processor slowly giving up.

Please post back if you have any more problems or questions.

by thechas

You have a number of good suggestions.

After power quality, the next thing I would check for would be magnets.

It can be amazing how many of those little flexible magnets some people will place on or near their computer. It takes fewer magnets on the case than one would think to cause problems with the hard drive.

Another thing to look at is ESD. Carpets and synthetic surfaces can generate some pretty high static charges. If the computer is the ground path, poof goes the system.

Like it or not, it is going to take a site visit to figure this one out.

Chas

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