Friends computer freezes *only* in the morning at initial boot

[murphy55d]

My buddy called me up and said recently his computer will freeze up several times in the morning, after being turned off all night. It'll take him 4-5 tries to get it to "stay running". It'll freeze anywhere from the Windows logo screen, to 30 seconds after all the icons have loaded in Windows. Once it finally gets going though, it'll be fine the rest of the day until the next morning when he goes to boot up.

Now, I had him run a malware and virus scan, and they came back with some minor things but nothing that stood out, and it still did it the next morning.

What could this be? I had thoughts about the hard drive but im not sure why it just starts to work properly... where else can i look?

He has an older Athlon XP system, XP Home, 1GB ram.

What do you guys think I should tell him?

EDIT:

I checked out his PC this morning, and for whatever reason I had a hunch it may be video related...so I went into the bios, raised the AGP voltage to 1.7, and now it seems to have fixed the issue. I only tried this because I had an issue once with my PC freezing up during 3d games, and raising the agp voltage fixed it.

What does this mean then? Is it a faulty card, or was it just not getting enough juice?

 

[corkyg]

Sounds like a driver problem encountered when doing a cold boot. A good diagnostic technique is to enter MSCONFIG and then the STARTUP tab. Uncheck as many suspicious items as you want. Then try the cold boot. Eventually you can isolate the guilty driver and replace it or simply remove it from the statup list.

Many software packages put themselves on that list. Few are really needed.

You can also do a cold boot using bootlog and see which driver it stops at.

The other alternative is to leave the machine on 24/7.

 

[murphy55d]

what would cause it to eventually just start working though? I really didnt think this was a driver or even a software issue at all. The worst part about troubleshooting this is that it ONLY happens at first boot, so all this has to be done when he first starts it.

 

[robisbell]

PSU issue probably, without full specs and testing, I'd more than likely say the PSU is the culprit.

 

[murphy55d]

He has a newer Antec Earthwatts 430, I do know that. Not sure what motherboard.

 

[nordloewelabs]

i had a similar prob on mt Athlon 3000+, but in my case the computer would fully boot to the desktop and work for a minute or 2, then reboot. i changed the Power Supply and the situation improved a little. later i checked the IDE ports on the motherboard and realized that the secondary channel was fried. i unplugged the DVD drive and the HD that were connected to it and the problem was gone for good.

 

[murphy55d]

I checked out his PC this morning, and for whatever reason I had a hunch it may be video related...so I went into the bios, raised the AGP voltage to 1.7, and now it seems to have fixed the issue. I only tried this because I had an issue once with my PC freezing up during 3d games, and raising the agp voltage fixed it.

What does this mean then? Is it a faulty card, or was it just not getting enough juice?