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Monday of this week I came home to my computer, only to have it repeatedly freezing after windows loaded for 10-15 minutes. I've had the machine in my sig since last August, never had any problems until this Monday.
Anyhow, my video card fan had been slowly dying over the past few months (ie getting louder and louder), however it is out of warranty, and I only have room for a one slot cooler, so my plan was to wait it out until the fan died.
On Monday, my initial reaction was that yeah, looks like the fan probably died because it was super quiet, I had assumed it had finally died and that was causing my lock ups. I swapped my brother's 8600GT in, and it worked fairly well all night, so I ordered a 8600GT for myself.
I installed mine Thursday, ran it all night for about five hours of gaming, and then I ran into the freezing problem. Everytime I restarted and went back into a game, I repeatedly froze, but up to that point it had looked fine. I also noticed that the freezing would generally occur within a minute or two of opening AIM 6.0. It seems that AIM 6.0 might be causing my problems, but I can't for the life of me figure out how its ran fine for 6 months and suddenly desides to misbehave.
Any help / thoughts would be appreciated.
Also, I've never seen any artifacting, which is generally the sign of a video card overheating, so I'm wondering if perhaps it could be another issue. Perhaps the Northbridge overheating? Whats a good app to monitor temps in Windows XP?
Thanks,
- Clear
Anyhow, my video card fan had been slowly dying over the past few months (ie getting louder and louder), however it is out of warranty, and I only have room for a one slot cooler, so my plan was to wait it out until the fan died.
On Monday, my initial reaction was that yeah, looks like the fan probably died because it was super quiet, I had assumed it had finally died and that was causing my lock ups. I swapped my brother's 8600GT in, and it worked fairly well all night, so I ordered a 8600GT for myself.
I installed mine Thursday, ran it all night for about five hours of gaming, and then I ran into the freezing problem. Everytime I restarted and went back into a game, I repeatedly froze, but up to that point it had looked fine. I also noticed that the freezing would generally occur within a minute or two of opening AIM 6.0. It seems that AIM 6.0 might be causing my problems, but I can't for the life of me figure out how its ran fine for 6 months and suddenly desides to misbehave.
Any help / thoughts would be appreciated.
Also, I've never seen any artifacting, which is generally the sign of a video card overheating, so I'm wondering if perhaps it could be another issue. Perhaps the Northbridge overheating? Whats a good app to monitor temps in Windows XP?
Thanks,
- Clear