Computer freezes, reboots at Windows login screen

[TMoney468]

I'm having a problem with a new PC I built about a month ago. First off, the specs:

Asus P5B-E, Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4 Ram, 480 Watt Antec PS, x1950 Pro Video Card, and 2x400GB Seagate drives.

What happens is that when the PC is first booted up, everything is fine until the Windows login screen, where the PC freezes and then reboots. Usually after it freezes and reboots it comes up fine, all though there is the occasional freeze and reboot again, and then it comes up fine. Temperatures are OK, I've tried setting every possible RAM setting to no avail, and on another forum they mentioned it could be a device/driver problem. The PC seems to boot fine into safe mode w/o any freezing, and I tried booting once with only one stick in, and that seemed to boot fine too, but I only tried that once.

Anyone have any ideas as to how I can troubleshoot this thing? It is extremely frustrating to have to go through that everyday just to get the PC up and running. What's the best place to start checking for problems? Thanks

 

[CurseTheSky]

Could be a few things:
-Bad Overclock / Low Voltages
-Corrupt Driver
-Overheating
-Dying Power Supply
-Bad Hardware

The very first thing you should do is remove ANY overclocking / tweaking you've done. Even if it's 10MHz, try bringing it back to stock. If you've upped or downed any voltages, put them back to stock or auto. A lot of memory will start out a 5-5-5-15 timings, while they're rated for 4-4-4-12 or better. If you've changed them to their rated timings, keep in mind that the memory may also be rated for higher voltages than the board is providing it with; I know mine requires 2.1v, while the board gave it 1.8v.

After that, try uninstalling and reinstalling drivers for common components. Start with the graphics card, then sound card, then motherboard chipset, etc. A BIOS update may also help.

Next, double check your system temperatures. Download Intel Thermal Anaysis Tool (Google, or check the Processor and Overclocking forum). If you're getting more than 40-50C idle OR 50-60C load, there's a problem - especially with an unoverclocked system.

Your power supply may be on its way out. What brand PSU do you have, and how many watts? Did it come with your case, or did you buy it seperate? Do you have a Digital Multi-Meter handy to test it? A quick way to test it is to monitor the voltages in the BIOS. They're not super accurate, but they help. Just before my first PSU failed, it was reading around 10 volts on the +12v rails.

Finally, run Memtest86 (there's a link in one of the stickies in Processors and Overclocking). Let it run for an hour at least, and see if you come up with any errors. If there's nothing, try swapping out components with any spare parts you have laying around, or anything that you can borrow.

Hope that helps.

 

[Seekermeister]

When I have had that problem, it either went away on it's own on the next reboot, or I went into safe mode and used last good configuration. It is more of a Windows problem, than it is hardware. But then, anything is possible.

 

[TMoney468]

@CurseTheSky

I haven't overclocked anything, so that's not a problem. Temps are fine too, as I checked them with CoreTemp. I should have mentioned the PS, its an Antec 480 TruePower, and like everything else it was brand new when I built the PC. The only thing that has me puzzled is how it can boot fine after it freezes, it seems like something in Windows is causing the system to hang at the login screen. One thing that I did notice that was odd was that in device manager, there were two primary and two secondary IDE controllers each, and one primary and one secondary controller had an exclamation point stating it couldn't find any available resources. I disabled the two with the exclamation point and shut down, waited 10 minutes or so and then booted up...and it booted fine, no freezing. I thought I had fixed it! But sure enough, this AM it froze again at the login and rebooted.

 

[TMoney468]

As it turns out, I ran Memtest on each stick of RAM separately, and the first stick came back with two errors within 50 minutes. But the bad news is that after booting up the system this morning with the 1 good stick of RAM, it still froze. I think I'm going to install 32-bit Vista on a seperate partition and see if I get any freezing when booting to Vista...this should let me know if its a hardware or software problem.

Do you think that the freezing problem could be the result of a bad power supply or some other piece of hardware?