Athlon 64 desktop / WinXP keeps freezing

[Jim Bancroft]

My specs:

Athlon 64 1.8 Ghz
2 GB PC3200 Ram (Corsair Value)
80 GB x 2 SATA HDD (Hitachi brand)
MSI Neo4 nForce4 mobo
Nvidia 6600GT video card (eVGA)

no overclocking
all parts purchased at Newegg

This drives me crazy....there's no rhyme or reason to it. I'll be surfing on FireFox, or listening to iTunes, or reading a word document, when my machine absolutely freezes up. Ctrl-alt-del does no good. Every blue moon I get a BSOD about a machine check exception, but that's not often. Usually the screen simply freezes.

Some days I can go eight hours with no trouble, others I'm out of luck within 30 minutes. All temp gauges read normal, per the MSI control panel.

I've swapped out the RAM, flipped the hard drives in and out (so that the slave becomes the master and vice versa) and run Prime95 and Sis Sandra for stress testing. Nothing's being picked up. Passes with flying colors.

I've updated the MSI bios, updated the nForce drivers, uninstalled the nForce IDE drivers, put all the WinXP service packs on, and it's the same old same old. Anything I can try from here to at least find out what's misbehaving?

 

[Gambit808]

have you checked your cpu temps?

 

[Jim Bancroft]

Yes, and they're well within normal. MSI Corecenter reports it as such. No overclocking for me, I just want a working PC 😉

 

[mechBgon]

Random questions: is Cool n' Quiet enabled or disabled? Are there any entries in Event Viewer that would shed light on it? Are you using good antivirus software? Do you have any P2P downloading going on in the background?

 

[Jim Bancroft]

No P2P going on, and the virus checker (updated definitions) hasn't found anything. Don't know about the Cool 'n Quiet settings -- I'll check in the bios. I assume the safest setting is "off" for that one? I'm not overclocking so not worried about the temperatures- CPU runs at 36 deg Celsius currently.

Nothing jumps out at me in the event log. I'd _love_ for this to be a CPU or Ram problem since they're easy to remedy. If it's the motherboard that's a different story of course. Do you know of any testing utilities that can check the motherboard / CPU / RAM? As mentioned I've run Prime95 and Sis Sandra but no problems with either.