unresponsive computer 5 minutes after startup

F

felony

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 15, 2005
Messages
82
My friend has emailed me with a problem. Read below, but it seems his computer becomes unresponsive/freezes after a few minutes of being on.. read on

"
AMD 2800+ underclocked, BIOS reports it as a 2200+
Gigabyte GA-7n400 Pro2 motherboard
512 megs ram
radeon 9800
120 gig ata hard drive, 40 gig windows partition, 80 gig backup files
(music, pr0n, etc.) partition
antec power supply, came with the case

Computer has been freezing, not like traditional slowing or freezing
up from running heavy applications, but completly locking up. The
mouse stops dead in it's tracks, videos pause, ctrl+alt+del does
nothing, restarting is the only fix but the computer does not restart
on it's own, in fact it can remain in this frozen state for several
hours. It seems to happen very sporadically, sometimes I can run BF2
for hours, other times it happens after 15 minutes of browsing on
firefox. Now it's to the point I can only run my computer for 5-10 min
intervals.

reformatted twice, made no difference

thought it could be my processor overheating, motherboard was
reporting it at 48c even when underclocked. I opened my case and found
my heatsink was wrapped in dust and lint, it looked like someone took
a lint trap and emptied it into the case. I cleaned that and removed
the heatsink. I didn't realize running a computer without a heatsink
was a bad idea, and burned my finger on the processor. It hurt like a
bitch but nothing permanent. I put the heatsink back on with no
change. I also didn't realize not having thermal compound was a big
problem. Got some arctic silver and applied it and reassembled
everything. processor now running around 40c, still underclocked.

Just recently I started getting more wierd problems, my firefox
favorites get erased or scrambled on every restart, even if I wasn't
using it at all. Zone alarm keeps giving me new requests for simple
programs like AIM and AVG that have always been granted access before.

Every single time I restart now, it gives me that blue screen telling
me my disks need to be checked for consistency.

A friend of mine suggested it might be the power supply, thats fine by
me I wanted one of those modular ones anyway. I figure I can probly
scam my parents for one by telling them my computer died. Maybe I can
get a new case too, we'll see.
"
 
I really don't think it sounds like a power supply issue. I would guess either a damaged CPU or Hard drive going bad. The only way to test would be parts swapping.
 
It could be a bad hard drive or bad memory. Can you get him to run memtest?
 
thanks for your replies so far.

i gave him the info and will have him run the memtest etc.

thanks
dan
 
just got word from roomie.

memtest reported no errors and highjack this said all was ok as well

any ideas?

dan
 
I would say it was the processor that was causing the problem, it has overheated while running without the HSF and has caused permanent damage. Years ago I was trying to overclock a 1Ghz Athlon and also ran that without the HSF on, I didnt realise how quick processors heated up, the PC shut down more or less instantly, after putting the HSF back on the computer then worked fine for the rest of that day, but come the following morning after being off all evening it wouldnt boot at all.

Changing the processor to a new one fixed all the issues.
 
hey guys.. i have been showing my roomate these posts by you guys and he appreciates the help for sure.. here is the latest from him..

Some of the things he has tried have been suggested at other forums, and he made me a general update for the different forums i post at..

again, any help is appreciated!

"
Update:

Ran the bootable version of memtest twice, got no errors. Did
scandisk, no errors.

Someone thought I had malware called "background buddy". It's actually
just a program that changes my background image every 15minutes. I
removed it just to be safe.

Just yesterday I was getting 5-10min of use out of my comp before
freezing, then out of nowhere it worked for 15 hours straight, during
which time I used firefox, AIM, iTunes, played BF2 for several hours,
and then slept 8-9 hours while downloading several bittorrents. I woke
this morning to find the computer still working fine. I did a restart
just to see what would happen and the "checking disk consistency"
screen did not come up, but my comp went back into 5-10 minute mode.
After a few cycles of freezing (with the disk consistency screen
coming up each time) suddenly it worked again, I am typing this after
having been playing BF2 for about 2 hours uninterrupted.

I am starting to doubt that my processor is the problem, considering I
was able to run BF2 for extended periods of time with no problems.

On a sidenote, I was running the bootable disk version of Ubuntu linux
yesterday, which I don't believe uses your hard drive at all while
running, and it froze as well, although it took quite a bit longer
before freezing.
"
 
update.

my roomate and i swapped processors.

His computer still froze, and my still works.

any other ideas?
 
Power ?
Heat ???

It sounds like something warms up and hits a critical temp which causes the computer to freeze.
As the CPU heat sink was full of dust bunnies, are all the other heat sinks the same and do all the fans spin properly.
Was the room a little colder when it ran for a few hours ?
Try running with the case side off and a room fan blowing clod air into the case.
Try removeing any spare drives, extra memory, etc, etc to lower the load on the PSU.

Luck.......... :D
 
just swapped ram out as well.. he still had the prob.

he is going to run the full maxtor test now.. but the quick diag test showed no probs.

dan
 
Tigerbiten said:
Power ?
Heat ???

It sounds like something warms up and hits a critical temp which causes the computer to freeze.
As the CPU heat sink was full of dust bunnies, are all the other heat sinks the same and do all the fans spin properly.
Was the room a little colder when it ran for a few hours ?
Try running with the case side off and a room fan blowing clod air into the case.
Try removeing any spare drives, extra memory, etc, etc to lower the load on the PSU.

Luck.......... :D
Click to expand...

ill pass the info along.

the 'bridge' on the mobo has a fan but it isnt working.. he says it hasnt worked for about a year. naturally i told him that might be a prob...
 
he just completed full HD test from maxtor.. "certified error free"

so, we have swapped CPU, processor, and HD is supposed to be good..

any ideas?

thanks in advance.
 
Hey this is the guy whose busted ass computer we're talking about.

To sum up:

Processor:
Swapped with my roommate, his computer still worked with mine, mine didn't work with his

Ram:
ran memtest 86 w/ no problems. Swapped ram, my comp still had problems

Hard drive:
Did full scan w/ manufacturer's software, no problems.

I removed the small fan (about the size of a quarter) from the bridge thing on my motherboard and placed an 80mm where it used to be, still froze up.
 
I had your motherboard in my previous system. The SATA controller on it was a nightmare. Do you have a PATA drive to try? on one of the NON-Raid ports, any port not hooked up to the SIL3112a chip.

I would get frequent BSODs while using the onboard SATA RAID. It was a driver issue. They probably have fixed it by now.. but it's worth mentioning.

Bought a PCI SATA RAID card (Promise S150 TX4) to get my system working.
 
v3rt1g0 said:
I had your motherboard in my previous system. The SATA controller on it was a nightmare. Do you have a PATA drive to try? on one of the NON-Raid ports, any port not hooked up to the SIL3112a chip.

I would get frequent BSODs while using the onboard SATA RAID. It was a driver issue. They probably have fixed it by now.. but it's worth mentioning.

Bought a PCI SATA RAID card (Promise S150 TX4) to get my system working.
Click to expand...


None of that made any sense to me...

In all seriousness, I have one single hard drive using regular ATA.

Another update, I ran memtest for 14 hours while I slept and went to class, it did a full 48 passes with no errors.
 
Well, its possible that the 'bridge' is damaged from heat since the fan was not working for so long. About the only thin you have left to try is another mobo.
 
I'm assuming by "bridge," you mean the northbridge. Uh... yes, this could be the issue. I'm going to say it probably IS the issue. Sorry, a new motherboard might be in order...
 
Ok here's a perplexing update.

Just last Thursday the comp started working properly out of nowhere. I intentionally did not turn off or restart it for as long as I could. It seemed once I got into a pattern of it working for an extended period of time, restarting would only set it back into the pattern of freezing. So it worked up until this morning. I had several days over the weekend of playing BF2, watching dvds, and some other stuff. When I woke this morning, the computer was frozen with the clock still reading 3am, and I'm back to the computer freezing every 5-10 minutes needing a restart. This severly sucks.
 
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