System lock-ups. Please help

[Brute]

I built a system last night that is constantly locking up on me. It's a p3-750, not overclocked, 128MB RAM, Geforce video, SMC NIC. After about 3 minutes of use, freeze. I can reboot using ctrl-alt-del, so it's not a total freeze. One type of lock up is when I drag an item to the trash can. The icons are shadowed like when they are being dropped in, but the process doesn't complete. Any ideas?

 

[Fardringle]

A couple of possibilities I can think of would be:

1) The new CPU is draining too much from the power supply and the Hard Drive isn't getting the power it needs, causing the system to lock up.

2) You installed a new motherboard with that new CPU, and didn't reinstall Windows, causing conflicts in the operating system, in which case you will need to at the very least delete the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ENUM key from your Registry to force Windows to redetect your hardware. A better option would be to completely wipe out Windows and reinstall.

3) Your Heat Sink isn't properly seated on the CPU with a good application of thermal grease, and the CPU is overheating, causing the system to lock up.

 

[Fardringle]

Also, what else is in that system? What model/brand of GeForce, what power supply, what motherboard, what sound card, any other hardware...?

 

[RC5Bri]

Do you have any hardware besides the NIC and video card? My dad bought a HP computer, and it had a bad sound card that was eating up all the system resources, and would completely freeze if you tried to open anything. I pulled the card, and everything worked perfectly(HP replaced the card, thankfully). So you might want to try "barebones" if you aren't already doing that. Or possibly trying the components in another computer(if possible).

 

[Brute]

Well, I swapped NICs and typical Win98, it didn't handle swapped hardware well at all. So, since it was a fresh install anyway, *poof* went Win98 and I reinstalled. Seems to be behaving now with a new NIC.

Man, I hope Whistler is better at handling hardware swaps.