Help, Random Lockups / Freezes

E

erebus1

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 14, 2004
Messages
398
Im having a problem with my pc here, and usually im really good at troubleshooting and fixing electronics/computers, but I cannot figure this one out... Its been going on for the past few months. I would greatly appreciate any help.

Symptom - lockups completely, no response from keyboard and sometimes the mouse, sometimes the I'm able to move the mouse around, but not click on anything and my keyboard is locked up. It happens randomly, but since I replaced my x1900gt with a hd3870 it seems to happen more often. Also, I watched house a few times on hulu and it seems to happen almost every time I watch hulu.

Things I've done so far - RMA'd 2 of the 4 sticks of mushkin 512mb ddr for the second time because I had a few errors in memtest, Im only running with 2 in there now but I have a feeling they could be bad too.
- Removed the sound card, no change.
- Put a house fan on the pc to check for overheating, no change.
- Updated drivers, and bios, no change.
- Moved Ram to different slots, no change.
- Moved the hd3870 and cdrom drive to a secondary PSU, no change.
- Upped Northbridge voltage, no change
- Upped CPU voltage, no change
- Upped ddr voltage from 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, no change, posts at 2.5 but loops restarts at windows splash

I guess its still possible that the ram and or psu are faulty, but I can't check that now as I dont have spares to try. Also this is not a new build, I leave this pc on all the time and its been my main pc for the past year or so. The last time this happened I rma'd 2 sticks of mushkin and it worked for a few months after that no problems.

Here's my specs -
Thermaltake 430W PSU
NEC 16x DVD/CD burner
2 - SATA 320gb maxtor drives not in raid.
4 x 512mb Mushkin DDR400 at 2.6-2.8v
DFI Lanparty Nforce4 Ultra AMD
AMD 4800X2
ATI HD3870
Hercules Fortissimo III 7.1
 
I like that silverstone, but in the not too distant future, If I build a quad core machine will that psu be enough? I'd like to get something fairly future proof but stay under 100$.
 
erebus1 said:
I like that silverstone, but in the not too distant future, If I build a quad core machine will that psu be enough? I'd like to get something fairly future proof but stay under 100$.
Click to expand...

This should last for a long long time:
Corsair 750TX 750W PSU - $101

But before you spend $100 on PSU, see if you can get a good PSU locally, check to see if the problems still persist. If they don't, return that locally bought PSU and get that Corsair.
 
Well, I ordered that Corsair, I figure what the heck, if its not the PSU, Im probably just gonna build a new pc anyway.

But Last night I did unplug one of the HDD and the CDROM drive to see if I could free up some power, and it hasn't crashed since.

Thanks for all the help, now I just hope mushkin returns my ram soon.
 
Im still waiting on that new psu, but so far, I've gotten 2 chips back from mushkin, put em in... its still crashing.

With the CDrom and 2nd HDD unplugged, still crashing.

Could a bad processor cause this?

Sometime this weekend Ill pull the HSF and northbridge HSF and clean and reapply thermal grease.
 
put in the new PSU and still crashing, only things that have not been swapped out are, CPU, motherboard, hard drive, OS

Im starting to think it could be a firefox or windows xp issue, possibly hard drive. It only seems to happen when Im watching hulu vids or revision3 vids...
 
I played Grid today for a couple of hours with no problems... Im leaning towards a video/firefox/os problem.

Are there any stress tests I can run?
 
I heard an interesting suggestion today. With hard drives so cheap, take one and do a clean install + game causing trouble. This would help eliminate software issues at least. Just never thought of doing it that way.
 
I can pretty confidently say its a software problem. I tried running prime95 and watching a movie on hulu and I could get it to hang withing 15 minutes several times.

So I took another hdd that I had an old os install on, and ran prime95 and hulu, and it finished the movie on hulu and prime95 ran all night long with no hangs.

Before I completely wipe my drive Im going to reinstall all the drivers and hopefully that will clear it up, because I really dont feel like doing a full format reinstall.

Consider this machine Fixed, thanks for all the help fellas.
 
Put windows on another hard drive and see if the problems go away.
If so you know it is a software issue.
 
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