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The computer has been randomly hard-locking. First, the mouse and keyboard will stop responding, then the screen will momentarily go blank, the image will return, but still be hard locked. Sometimes, letting it sit for 10 seconds will let it return to normal, until it hard locks again. The thing that really confuses me is the screen flashing black, and then returning. It indicates a graphics problem to me, but unless the drivers are screwy, it should be fine.
At first I thought it was some new ram I bought, so I ran memtest. It went 2 hours with no errors. Then I ran defrag: 69% fragmentation (yikes). I defragged twice, and then let O&O defrag go over it a couple times. Still no luck...
I started poking around inside my case to see if maybe some hardware was loose, and I noticed my chipset heatsink was hot enough to burn me. I've had some worry about that, because I have an Asus A8N-SLI deluxe and a Lian Li V2000 case. For those who don't know, the A8N deluxe has a heatpipe cooler, and the V2000 inverts the motherboard - heatpipes don't work upside down all that well, so I thought this heating might be causing the problem. I laid the case on its side and checked temps - they're fine.
So, I reformatted and reinstalled windows, thinking it might be software related. No such luck - brand new windows install, and I'm still getting hard locks. (Edit: I forgot to mention that at this point I decided to let memtest run overnight to make sure. It went 10.5 hours with no errors.)
Here are my system specs. My computer didn't seem to freeze with my old ram, so I put that back in:
Asus A8N-SLI deluxe, nVidia drivers 6.70
AMD X2 4400+, stock heatsinks, good temps
Corsair PC3200 XMS 1024MB
1 x XFX 7800GT, Forceware 81.98
Silverstone Z52F PSU
Western Digital 74gb raptor SATA system drive
Western Digital 300gb backup SATA drive
NEC 3450 DVD+/-RW
Pioneer 16x slot-load DVD-ROM
(Edit: no overclocking on anything)
The whole system was built brand new in the last week of November.
I have heard some similar freezing problems with the 8x.xx series of nVidia drivers. I have heard 77.77 drivers fixes a random freezing problem some people seem to have, so I'm going to try that for now, but I'm really at wit's end. I have no idea what the HELL is going on, and I don't know how to diagnose the problem.
It's not memory, it's not software, and it's not corrupt data on the disk. The computer was working fine a month ago, and was able to play games like HL2 in 1920x1200, high settings, with no problem.
The freezing seems to be mostly random, but it looks like it happens most during periods of high activity. For instance, one time it froze when I was telling uTorrent to "resume all torrents", and another time it locked up when a media player was hashing files in the media library. Other times, however, it will just freeze while I'm going to open something in control panel or something equally minor. S.M.A.R.T. says the drive is ok, but that's not much of an indicator.
Any help would be great. Googling turns up nothing, but it's hard to google for the exact problem I mentioned in the second paragraph above.
At first I thought it was some new ram I bought, so I ran memtest. It went 2 hours with no errors. Then I ran defrag: 69% fragmentation (yikes). I defragged twice, and then let O&O defrag go over it a couple times. Still no luck...
I started poking around inside my case to see if maybe some hardware was loose, and I noticed my chipset heatsink was hot enough to burn me. I've had some worry about that, because I have an Asus A8N-SLI deluxe and a Lian Li V2000 case. For those who don't know, the A8N deluxe has a heatpipe cooler, and the V2000 inverts the motherboard - heatpipes don't work upside down all that well, so I thought this heating might be causing the problem. I laid the case on its side and checked temps - they're fine.
So, I reformatted and reinstalled windows, thinking it might be software related. No such luck - brand new windows install, and I'm still getting hard locks. (Edit: I forgot to mention that at this point I decided to let memtest run overnight to make sure. It went 10.5 hours with no errors.)
Here are my system specs. My computer didn't seem to freeze with my old ram, so I put that back in:
Asus A8N-SLI deluxe, nVidia drivers 6.70
AMD X2 4400+, stock heatsinks, good temps
Corsair PC3200 XMS 1024MB
1 x XFX 7800GT, Forceware 81.98
Silverstone Z52F PSU
Western Digital 74gb raptor SATA system drive
Western Digital 300gb backup SATA drive
NEC 3450 DVD+/-RW
Pioneer 16x slot-load DVD-ROM
(Edit: no overclocking on anything)
The whole system was built brand new in the last week of November.
I have heard some similar freezing problems with the 8x.xx series of nVidia drivers. I have heard 77.77 drivers fixes a random freezing problem some people seem to have, so I'm going to try that for now, but I'm really at wit's end. I have no idea what the HELL is going on, and I don't know how to diagnose the problem.
It's not memory, it's not software, and it's not corrupt data on the disk. The computer was working fine a month ago, and was able to play games like HL2 in 1920x1200, high settings, with no problem.
The freezing seems to be mostly random, but it looks like it happens most during periods of high activity. For instance, one time it froze when I was telling uTorrent to "resume all torrents", and another time it locked up when a media player was hashing files in the media library. Other times, however, it will just freeze while I'm going to open something in control panel or something equally minor. S.M.A.R.T. says the drive is ok, but that's not much of an indicator.
Any help would be great. Googling turns up nothing, but it's hard to google for the exact problem I mentioned in the second paragraph above.