Computer Freezing...

S

Sardaan

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 13, 2004
Messages
200
I recently gave my parents one of my work horse computers that I have had for years. AMD Athlon 2100+, it has a nv6600 AGP card and is actually a descent computer for their needs: email, web browsing, banking. My parents are very computer illiterate and their old machine (celeron 900mhz) caused me spend many hours on the phone trouble shooting.

Now I think they are cursed, the "new" computer has worked flawlessly for 2 months until this week. The computer fully boots to windows and then completely hangs (all inputs are frozen) within a minute of a complete boot. The only hint that I have been given is that a skype window now opens near the end of the boot process which was not occurring before the problem. They told me today that the hard drive light is solid after the computer freezes, which is making me think it could be a worm or virus. (They are running NOD32 antivirus)

I had them boot the computer into safe mode with networking and the computer never hangs, which eliminates hardware failure...for the most part. They tried to uninstall skype but got an error message that was not available in safe mode.

Any thoughts? They lives a few hours away and I am dreading a drive home just to repair their computer.
 
Well did they run a NOD32 scan while in safe mode?

Also have them go into MSConfig and uncheck any unneccessary apps from the startup.
 
We ran a full scan this morning and found zero infections. :-(

It is running fine in safe mode (not freezing up) but locks up hard as descirbed above when we boot into full XP.
 
Don't rule out a bad HDD IMHO. A lot more things are being loaded from the HDD when you don't load into safe mode. There may be trouble with the area of the HDD that is being accessed with a full boot.

I have seen these exact symptoms when an HDD was just about to go south (and then a month or so later, finally did). If they have anything worth saving, they should backup now and I'd recommend at the very least running an HDD diagnostic from the HDD manufacture to see if that turns anything up.
 
Make sure they run Msconfig and remove the skype and any other programs from the boot process. Skype may be trying to load a prvious session and is unable to find it causing an infinite loop.
 
If its an older NVidia motherboard, make sure it has the latest motherboard drivers as some older ones had faulty IDE drivers included.
 
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