Crazy problem: who thinks they can help me?!?!?!?!

[s1d3fx]

Noticed something really strange... sometimes the comp will just randomly work upon restarting it. This is why i thought certain things were fixed the issue before because the comp was working fine, only to find out later on that once i restarted it, they were back again... that said, i can no longer get it to perform properly even upon restarting it over and over. 🙁 I dont even have a clue of what to try next other than replacing the motherboard or harddrive.

 

[gils2000]

Try looking at your IRQ's see what is on what and what is sharing with what.

 

[tshock22]

I can recommend a few tests/ideas -

a) Run some diagnostic software on your harddrive to check for errors.

b) Get a new SATA cable

c) Run a memory testing program (although this sounds very unlike a memory issue....usually those = nonrecoverable lockups).

I personally had a bad ide cable about a year back that was causing issues like you are mentioning. It was very frustrating to diagnose, but a new cable did the trick. If you want to try something, while a lockup is occuring, jiggle the sata cable a bit and see if that unfreezes the problem.

If you want to do some generic 'testing', try finding VERY large files/folders on your drive and copy->paste. This will really run the drive thru some work. To really help pinpoint, pull everything from cpu except vidcard, hd, and 1 stick of memory (and cpu of course 🙂 ). Then run the harddrive tests.

Other testing would be to go to controlpanel->administrativetools->performance and see type of counters spike when the lockups occur.

Good luck....