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New PC Freezing

I

Imager

Senior member
Weird thing. All of sudden my new PC (see sig) is Freezing at different times. Sometimes it'll wait a few days, others it'll freeze with in minutes. Doesn't happens however when I'm actually doing something with the PC.
I know this is always a hard one to trace, but I'm leaning towards the HDD. When its being hit by playing games, or chatting its ok but when the PC is Idle and the only thing running is AIM and a trivia chat program it seems to freeze. Then again if I'm pulling something down thru FTP it'll freeze too, when I'm not there at the PC though (figures). Its weird that it doesn't happen on a constant level, and could be days before it happens again, but recently its been happening a lot more.
Nothing on my system is OC'd, and I have the latest BIOS. No additional software was installed than what I had a few days after original build.
I have tried it with power management options off, and screen saver off last night - this morning it was frozen.

Any help/thoughts would be appreciated! Thanks as always!
 
freezing as in locks up? check fans and temps... maby try an OS reinstall? perhaps you had a corrupt installation... just guesses though.
 
I would suspect the Maxtor. Assuming it's your Windows drive, you'll have to install on the Seagate to verify.
 
fans all working fine! PC temps are 27-30C

Yeah the Maxtor is my C drive - wouldn't make sense to use the 16mb cache on just a side drive, haha
 
I was just in the middle of doing a copy/paste and the damn thing froze on me *UGH*!

I don't hear any noise from the HDD's that might be causing anything - I know that doesn't always have to be the case......
 
I looked in "event viewer" under computer management and noticed on the application and system areas that there were some warnings and errors. Quite a few DHCP, W32, and TCPIP. However nothing recent.

On the 3rd I was in the middle of playing a game and it froze - rebooted and was fine until the morning of the 5th. Then it was fine until this morning which when I went to go on it, it was frozen.

Should I suspect its something with the OS install, or could it still be a HDD or memory issue?
 
Run Memtest86+ from a CDboot disk,download it from here . Do you have Nvidia SW IDE drive installed and NCQ enabled,try disabling NCQ.
 
I ran memtest before but don't recall any errors, but I'll run it again.

Nope don't recall install any Nvidia SW IDE drive and I didn't manually enable/install NCQ. Would that be under the properties of the drive within device manager? Or would they both just be under add/remove software? If the later is the case than no to both.
 
Run Memtest86 and Prime95 and try running them all night to see if it comes back with errors and/or freezes. If no errors and your temps are fine, it could be either your OS install, the Maxtor HD or your PSU. It's entirely possible that it "could" be your PSU? How many amps are on the 12v rail? And also check bios to see if the voltages are accurate.

I would maybe try a reinstall of your OS, or even maybe switching out the HD's and making the Seagate the primary, formatting, installing OS and run it for a few days just to see. If it fails too then check your PSU.

I had problems with Antec PSU's....2 have died on me in the past 6 months and now I use Rosewill and haven't had any issues and they are actually more powerful than Antec IMO.
 
Originally posted by: joejccva
Run Memtest86 and Prime95 and try running them all night to see if it comes back with errors and/or freezes. If no errors and your temps are fine, it could be either your OS install, the Maxtor HD or your PSU. It's entirely possible that it "could" be your PSU? How many amps are on the 12v rail? And also check bios to see if the voltages are accurate.

I would maybe try a reinstall of your OS, or even maybe switching out the HD's and making the Seagate the primary, formatting, installing OS and run it for a few days just to see. If it fails too then check your PSU.

I had problems with Antec PSU's....2 have died on me in the past 6 months and now I use Rosewill and haven't had any issues and they are actually more powerful than Antec IMO.
Click to expand...

Started the P1 Factoring with B1 on the Prime95 last night, its still running this morning.
Going to run a few other Prim95 tests as well, then the memtest one too.

When I reboot I'll go into the BIOS and see what the amps are on the 12v rail.

Temps seem to be fine according to the LCD - 27/33 - 42 has been the max its ever been and that was one time while playing a game.
Nothing is OC'd btw

 
Sounds more characteristic of a conflict, first guess the NIC. Forgive me, I just got up and the coffee's on. I've seen a number of threads with problems similar to you, they typically trace back to the NIC or sound card. If it's on-board, try disabling it or if it's a card move it to another slot. Most of the things you're seeing in Event Viewer are just common polling issues.

I'd also turn off system restore and reboot (clear out old points, in case you have an error there). Actually, as I'm awakening a bit, have you done an AdAware scan lately?
 
Go to Systems tools you can see what IRQs are sharing with what,maybe a conflict like Slammy1 suggested,worth a look.
 
I recently had a problem with a stick of memory and Memtest did not pick it up. Multiple passes, showed the memory was fine. As soon as I popped the particular stick, out the lockups stopped. Used the opportunity to upgade my ram.
 
Originally posted by: Slammy1
Sounds more characteristic of a conflict, first guess the NIC. Forgive me, I just got up and the coffee's on. I've seen a number of threads with problems similar to you, they typically trace back to the NIC or sound card. If it's on-board, try disabling it or if it's a card move it to another slot. Most of the things you're seeing in Event Viewer are just common polling issues.

I'd also turn off system restore and reboot (clear out old points, in case you have an error there). Actually, as I'm awakening a bit, have you done an AdAware scan lately?
Click to expand...

NIC and Sound both on board. BUt I do have a spare NIC I could install and disable the other one for a test. Don't have a spare onboard soundcard though.

As for IRQ's - nothing conflicting there!
I'll see what Prime95 says when I get home, as it was still running when I left. Hopefully the PC won't lock between now and then....

I'll take one memory bank out and test with just the other one too and see, then swap and see what happens....

 
I have had issues due to memory like the one you are experiencing as well. It would be fine when using an application (most of the time), and then when it would power down or use less resources, it would lock up and I'd wake up to my screen frozen. I ended up having to replace the ram.
 
well under system the last two enteries that were warnings say W32 and TCP/IP and both were from 12/6/05
Last 2 errors I had were:
12/4/05 - Browser and 12/3 system error along with warnings on 12/4 for browser and w32.

The Prime95 I had been running since yesterday I couldn't tell what that read cause when I got home today the PC was frozen 🙁

However I just started to run the "torture test" and so far the results are:
self-test 1024K passed!

selftest 8K passed!
__________________________________________________________

Going to cancel that out and then reboot with the memtest and re run the Prime again.
 
OK just got done running memtest - dunno how much I have to run it for but I ran 8 tests (took a good while) and it returned no errors or ECC errors - passed everything there it seems!

Going to run the Torture test on Prime95 again overnight and see what that reports....
 
Ran Prime95 from last night until just now and everything Passed!

I guess my next step is either reinstall OS 🙁 or take out 1 stick of memory and test eventhough memtest seemed to test OK.
 
Originally posted by: Mavrick007
Try doing the same tasks with just one stick of ram. If it still freezes, switch to just the other stick of ram.
Click to expand...

If you mean same tests? Wouldn't the Prime95 or memtest show something with both in?

 
There will occasionally come a time where Memtest will show all PASSED, but still have some bad ram, but it's extremely rare. I used to build PC's for a living and out of a 2 year time period, I've seen it happen only once. And to answer your question, yes memtest would show errors even if both sticks or one stick was in the machine. Doesn't matter. If the ram is faulty, 9.9 times out of 10, memtest will pick it up. It has for me for a long time.

Chances are, your ram is fine. No IRQ conflicts that you've seen. If your NIC had an IRQ conflict it could possibly be the cause of the freezes but there are no conflicts. If the card itself was somewhat faulty it wouldn't really cause you to lock up, the internet wouldn't work or it'd be running at minimal performance. The browser and tcp/ip warning that you are seeing in the event viewer should have nothing to do with your pc freezing.

It could be your OS build, have you tried putting in the secondary HD yet? Formatting it and installing fresh copy of win xp? You can also try the steps below as well.

Here's what your next steps you be. I want you to go to this site.

http://www.pcpitstop.com

On the left side click on "Full Test" and then click on the "New Member" test and then "Test Anonymously". Have it run this test on your machine. Fix anything it asks for.

Also go to www.guru3d.com and download the 3dmark programs like 3dmark 03 and 05. Also get Sisoft Sandra 2005, and maybe Motherboard Monitor.

Run these programs and do some testing. Stress the heck out of your equipment to see if it may be video, sound, motherboard related also. It's tough to see.

Do NOT forget that this "could" very well be your PSU as well. Test all other hardware first and report back here. I'll be waiting.



 
OK - here we go for some things:

I checked my 12v rail and it said (bounced from) 12.10 to 12.16

PCPitstop I passed with flying colors!

Motherboard Monitor - well it didn't list my board so I wasn't really sure what settings to set or read - there were SO many!

3dmark 05 scores:
3dMark05 7210 (game test)

CPU Score 4697

Sisoft Sandra 05 - OPPSIE! was running the Performace Tune Up Wizard and the PC Froze. This was with one memory bank in, since I took the other out for testing....
 
ok just re-ran Sandra:

it completed that same test, and this time it gave an error during the Winsock & security Info part - not enough resources or not compatible it said with this pop up error:

RPCSANDRASRV.EXE Application error
The instruction at "0x77e7c4a3" referenced memory at "0x073808fc". The memory could not be written.
 
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