Strange problem, my computer keeps locking up

stringcheeseincident

Senior member
Nov 11, 2003
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This probablem started happening regularly about a week ago. I'm on my PC for most of the day, I'm usually not doing anything too hardware intensive, nothing in specific seems to trigger it. I'll be in Firefox browsing the web, there will be a loud click sound from my case (which has the side panel off), and my computer will lock up. There are no problems after I reboot the system. Sometimes I'll power off, and when I power back on the computer will hang when initializing my IDE harddrives, but after about a minute it'll recognize them all and boot into Windows fine.

Today I came home from class, everything seemed fine, but after I moved my mouse for a few seconds it froze without the click sound. Once I rebooted it gave me some errors and wouldn't start into Windows. I rebooted, ran chkdsk which fixed some problems, and now it's working fine again.

Anybody have any ideas what it might be? I think the clicking sound might be my CPU fan which gets stuck, then my processor heats up and causes the computer to freeze. I built my PC a few years ago, so a lot of my hardware is old/outdated. I clean my case out about once a month with compressed air, so there shouldn't be anything clogging the fan. If my CPU was heating up, I'm not sure why it would then cause the recognizing of IDE drives to be very slow when I reboot after.

AMD Athlon XP 2500+
Abit NF7-S
2 x 512mb Crucial PC3200 DDR RAM
Sapphire Radeon 9600 non-pro
2 x 80gb Western Digital SE harddrives
1 x Maxtor 120gb harddrive

Help is appreciated.