Please help me pin point my problem

[Nocturnal]

Ok my setup is as follows:

Motherboard: ASUS A7N266-e (onboard everything)

Ram: One stick of Crucial 256 PC2100 DDR SDRAM

CPU: AMD Athlon T-Bird 1.4 GHZ

HDD: IBM 60GXP 60 GIG HDD

Ok so my problem is that sometimes my computer freezes up for no reason.

I tried different sticks of ram and it happens with all sticks of ram. When I try to use three sticks of ram in all three slots it happens and gets worse.

My hdd tonight keep spinning up and making noises like it was searching but couldn't find anything.

I don't know what the hell the problem is but I only have $100.00 to fix it until two weeks from now.

Please help me pin point my problem, thanks!

 

[Darien]

You can try a format/reinstall windows with updated everything (drivers) and see if the problem persists.
Have you checked to see if your motherboard was the problem?
What kind of RAM did you test it with? Use those sticks with another computer and see if there are an stability problems.


That's all I can think of at 2:12 AM...more later (if I'm still alive after this all nighter)



EDIT: bleh, about 2 hours later and I'm neffing on AT again -_- Except now with some sugar to keep me going

My hdd tonight keep spinning up and making noises like it was searching but couldn't find anything.

What kind of noises? If you have ever heard a hard drive about to die (lots of clicking) and it sounds just about the same, you got your reason.

 

[AndyHui]

Two immediate possibilities that I can see.

One is that your IBM hard drive is about to keel over. A common occurence on your model. The other possibility (since you did not list it) is that your power supply is not strong enough.

 

[Jeff7181]

If you can hear the hard drive doing anything other than small clicking noises during read/writes... there's a problem with it... hard drives do not spin down when not in use and spin up when you access them like CD-ROM drives do.

Is your motherboard and hard drive SMART capable? If so, is it enabled?

 

[XBoxLPU]

Your hard drive is most likely dying