Machine stalls intermittently on start-up...

[fretman]

I have XP and Vista running on my machine. There are times when I turn on my machine where it would just hang or freeze and all I can see is a faint outline of the XP or Vista logo tyring to load up. The only thing I can do is a reboot at this point. I then get the message that says Windows did not start normally the last time. I select the option to start Windows normally and everything is OK.

Anyone have any ideas what might be causing this?

Thanks.

 

[mpilchfamily]

What are your system specs?

 

[fretman]

Originally posted by: mpilchfamily
What are your system specs?

Here are the essentials...

P5KC motherboard
Intel Q6600 processor at 2.40
4gb ram
Nvidia 8800 GTS with 640mb ram
Vista Ultimate 64-bit
XP Professional Service Pack 2

Anything else just let me know. Thanks for the help.

 

[mpilchfamily]

What is the RAm voltage set at in the BIOS? Somtimes you need to give it a bump up when you have 4 DIMMs in the system. Unless your running 2x 2gb DIMMs.

What PSU do you have?

 

[fretman]

Originally posted by: mpilchfamily
What is the RAm voltage set at in the BIOS? Somtimes you need to give it a bump up when you have 4 DIMMs in the system. Unless your running 2x 2gb DIMMs.

What PSU do you have?

Right now I'm running 2 sticks of 2gb ram. My ram voltage is set to the manufacturer's settings for these sticks at 2.0v

I have the Antec Sonata 3 case which has the supplied EarthWatts 500 Watt power supply unit.

Thanks again for any suggestions.

 

[nomagic]

I have encountered a very similar problem. The symptoms were almost exactly as you described, except the faint windows logo part.

After many many hours of research and troubleshooting, I realized that the freeze was caused by an incompatible service/program.

I uninstalled the program and got rid of the service it installed. The problem went away.

This may not be the solution to your problem. But it is definitely worth checking out.

Good Luck

 

[fretman]

Originally posted by: nomagic
I have encountered a very similar problem. The symptoms were almost exactly as you described, except the faint windows logo part.

After many many hours of research and troubleshooting, I realized that the freeze was caused by an incompatible service/program.

I uninstalled the program and got rid of the service it installed. The problem went away.

This may not be the solution to your problem. But it is definitely worth checking out.

Good Luck

That sounds like a possible solution but I'm not even sure if any programs are being loaded up until the point of freezing. The system freezes just as the XP or Vista logo appears. When the system freezes you can see a very faint image of the logo. And there doesn't seem to be anything I can pinpoint at this point because this is such a sporadic problem.

Thanks for the suggestion.