Oddest computer f'up I've ever seen

[MDesigner]

I've built quite a few PCs, and have experienced all kinds of issues.. but this is something totally new I've never seen before.

I was out of town this weekend, and was trying to connect to my computer at home via Remote Desktop. No luck. Hmm..very weird. Even if the machine blue screen'd, it will reboot and everything will be accessible again. And the network was up & running fine.. so I got home and checked it out. The monitor was in standby mode, and the computer was completely unresponsive. All fans were spinning normally, there was no power to the USB mouse (the fancy lights were off) or any other USB devices... basically it's as if the damned thing was turned off, but it wasn't. No power output, no VGA output, nothing..just fans running as usual.

Anyone ever seen this?? What the heck causes this and how do I even begin to troubleshoot this? It happens totally randomly, it seems.

 

[KeithTalent]

My laptop does this when it is in hibernate mode.

 

[MDesigner]

Hm, hibernate isn't even enabled on this machine..

 

[KeithTalent]

Originally posted by: MDesigner
Hm, hibernate isn't even enabled on this machine..

Too bad, because that is obviously an easy fix. The first time my lappy went into hibernate I thought the thing was totaly screwed up; it was doing the exact same things you described.

 

[MDesigner]

Except in hibernate, the fans shouldn't be spinning. The computer should be effectively turned off. With this prob I'm having, all fans are running... power is being supplied to the PC. But the monitor has no signal, and all USB devices are powered off.

 

[SparkyJJO]

That sounded more like suspend. Hibernate saves the current state of the comp to the HD, then shuts down. You can unplug it and it won't forget anything. With suspend, everything is put to RAM and the computer goes to low power state, shutting off USB, HD, and most other things, but the PSU is still on so the fans keep spinning. All it takes to wake it up is either a punch on the keyboard (that is still active) or tapping the power button again.

I had a computer act like that once except it wasn't really in suspend. It had basically half-crashed, half shut down. Never did figure it out, and it didn't do it again so I didn't worry about it.

 

[Yanagi]

I have the very same issue with my machine and will try to reinstall the whole thing this week.

Please write down your machine specs. Hardware / Software, Drivers and driver versions. We might be able to work something out of this...

 

[NuroMancer]

It will be interesting to see if there are comminalities between the two systems.

Also, remove "extra" components that are not needed for the computer to run.
Like Sound cards etc, leaving only the essential components in and see if this fixes it.

Did it happen once or does it constantly happen?

 

[MichaelD]

Possibly, one of your attached devices is telling the PC to hibernate/shut down, but it's not happening correctly.

If you go into Device Manager and look at the properties of most devices like NIC, soundcard, etc, you'll see a checkbox for "Allow this device to wake computer up/put it to sleep" etc. Check that out.

 

[Yanagi]

I'll leave you my Quick specs that I can remember from the top of my head:

AMD64 3500+
2 x 512 MB memory (forgot brand)
NF 4 MSI mobo
ATi Radeon X800 PCIe (6. something drivers, dont remeber right now)

Running Windows XP SP 2, no engergy saving settings or anything of the sort turned on.

I installed MS SQL server on the machine. I think it was right after that the problems started but I cannot be too ure.

Im also running daemon tools which maght have something to do with it.. As I said. I will try reinstalling the computer during the week but first I'll try uninstalling Daemon tools.

Other than that I'm running the latest nForce 4 drivers from nVIDIA.

I'll update the system with more information when I get home, I'm at work right now.

 

[Nick5324]

Originally posted by: MichaelD
Possibly, one of your attached devices is telling the PC to hibernate/shut down, but it's not happening correctly.

If you go into Device Manager and look at the properties of most devices like NIC, soundcard, etc, you'll see a checkbox for "Allow this device to wake computer up/put it to sleep" etc. Check that out.

Actually, this sounds fairly likely. Good call MichaelD.

 

[MDesigner]

Interesting. I'll check out the wake/sleep options tonight.

For my system specs, click the link in my sig.

 

[MDesigner]

OK, I caught my computer red handed. I was working on some stuff, nothing intense or crazy..just email & whatever, and it locked up on me. Total lock-up, nothing worked. I think this is what I saw when I got home that one day and the monitor was stuck in standby and the computer was just sitting there. It had probably shut the monitor off.. and then later locked up.

Lockups suck They're the hardest thing to diagnose. Anyone have any tips on where to start??

 

[tjpark1111]

sounds like spyware/viruses to me. I had the EXACT symptoms on my laptop.

 

[xtknight]

Probably some ACPI power state problem. You can try messing with those settings in your BIOS. Unless you completely disable ACPI, Windows should still boot and everything.

 

[MDesigner]

Nah, not spyware/viruses. I have a solid anti-virus app. And spyware? Heh.. I'm very careful about what I download.

ACPI power state problem... causing a complete lockup? Hmm. I dunno..maybe. I've never had issues with ACPI in the past, on other machines. Why now?

 

[Yanagi]

ACPI Is completely disabled on my machine. Im beginning to think its hardwaqre related so before I reinstall I will try to remove all my external devices.. and see what happens. I will also try running memtest and Super PI for quite a while. My temps are fine otherwise. 33C Idle mid 40s under load for the CPU.

Anyways. Just a small "update"

 

[MDesigner]

I don't think my issue is hardware.. I don't have much going on. M/b, CPU, vid card, audio card..that's pretty much about it!

How did you disable ACPI, via the BIOS? If I do so, will I lose the ability for Windows to automatically put my monitor in standby mode? I don't care about the computer going into sleep/standby, I never use that anyway. But I do like it to turn my LCD monitor off after 30 mins or so.

 

[oynaz]

I had a problem much like yours. It turned out one of my RAM sticks were defective.

 

[Yanagi]

Originally posted by: oynaz
I had a problem much like yours. It turned out one of my RAM sticks were defective.

Thats what I'm starting to believe the issue is. hence the memtest I will run. Its still time for me to do a reinstall. So I'll try that first anyway. If it doesnt resolve the issue I will run memtest. If one ramstick is defective I will just upgrade to 2Gb ram anyway

 

[MDesigner]

Not a RAM issue, most likely, because these two sticks were used in my previous machine which ran with absolutely zero issues. Now they're in my new machine.. same sticks. Still, though, if I were to run a RAM test on these two 1GB sticks, which RAM test should I run? memtest86 is fine but.. geez, it takes like a good 2 days to run a test, I don't have time for that!

 

[Dman877]

That's what happens to my comp if it goes into standby. Never did figure out how to wake it up so I just don't use standby anymore.

 

[SlitheryDee]

Originally posted by: MDesigner
Not a RAM issue, most likely, because these two sticks were used in my previous machine which ran with absolutely zero issues. Now they're in my new machine.. same sticks. Still, though, if I were to run a RAM test on these two 1GB sticks, which RAM test should I run? memtest86 is fine but.. geez, it takes like a good 2 days to run a test, I don't have time for that!

Your sig doesn't mention a PSU what brand/specs are you running? You've got a lot of hardware in that computer. Maybe the PSU is having trouble keeping the current steady.

 

[zephyrprime]

That's happened to me. It's just due to one version of my bios not being any good at sleeping. It would put the computer to sleep but all the fans would still be on.

 

[MDesigner]

The PSU is an Enermax Liberty 500W, with active PFC. I doubt there are any power issues there.

PS, let me clarify something.. my computer never goes into standby or sleep mode. I don't use those. It's just my LCD monitor that gets put into "power off" mode after 30 mins of idle time. So basically what happened here was, the LCD monitor was in standby.. and the computer locked up. So moving the mouse or hitting the keyboard wouldn't wake the monitor up.