Why is my computer falling apart?

G

gthorn2000

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 22, 2005
Messages
247
I have a pretty good gaming rig (a64 3700+, 1GB RAM, 7800GT) and it has always worked perfectly. Then all of a sudden this afternoon I was playing WoW and the FPS drops to 1 FPS! Thought I might have a cooling problem but all the CPU, Case, and GFX temps are perfectly fine. I started to defrag my comp, and then my PC locked up! For the last 3 hours I havent been able to use my PC for more than 10 min tops without freezing! (I am writing this on another comp BTW).

I HAVE NO CLUE WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY PC! PLEASE HELP ME!
 
PC lockups totally suck... I feel your pain. Start with your RAM. If you have some spare RAM or 2 sticks in dual channel take one of the sticks out and see what happens. Then start looking at your PSU voltages in your BIOS to see how stable they are.
 
Could be your heatsink is coming loose and opening a slight air gap and causing the CPU to overheat. I had that happen to me...
 
Does your computer freeze when you boot into safe mode? (Press F8 after POST)
 
you probably have a jam at the bit feeder for the graphics card. it's not uncommon to get one of those after a while. pull the card out and make sure the capacitors are completely dust-free; this contributes to bit feeder jams.

if that doesn't fix it, a failing or insufficient power supply can often cause random lockups (particularly when under loads).
 
This kind of thing happens this time of year a lot, when room temperatures start rising...

If you're comfortable with it (i.e. you originally built the system yourself): strip it down, get the dust out, replace any fans that are making odd noises like the dust is wearing them out, remount coolers with new thermal compound, et cetera. Run it through a round of Memtest (which in addition to telling you if the memory is fine, will tell you if things are fine on a purely hardware/BIOS level). If you have a spare hard drive or know your way around a Linux LiveCD, check if it's a software-layer issue by testing it under a different OS install. If it's stable there, try Prime for a bit, if it's still stable you need to start with things like reinstalling your graphics drivers, chipset drivers, Windows repair install...
 
TheCreator said:
Sounds like your harddrive could possibly be dying.
Click to expand...

Funny story, hilarious really, my wife's computer just had a drive go bad...fortunately, a few hours letting Seatools play with it made it all better. It wouldn't hurt to try that too (or the appropriate analogue from whoever made your drive).
 
Thanks for all your suggestions. The problem fixed itself without me doing anything! I think it had something to do with Windows Automatic Update or something really weird. Anyways, I will check on my HDs just to make sure. Thanks for your ideas!

I downloaded Seatools and both of my HDs failed the Short Drive Self Test and the Long Drive Self Test! Does that mean they are about to fail? They passed the other tests.
 
Man, both HDDs failing? That would be a coincidence if they were both bad...

But I would have tried rebooting the computer to see if it fixed itself.

I discovered when using a USB Hard Drive (an iRiver), it tended to freeze Vista up. Zero response. I unplug the darn thing, it unfroze and worked just fine.
Could be something to that extent... I don't know what caused my problem, though.
 
If both drives are coming up short on tests, It would be hard to believe. I would start at the controller, could be faulty chipsets, getting too hot. Or it could be driver issues. Maybe re-install chipset drivers?
 
What kind of RAM do you have installed?

gthorn2000 said:
I have a pretty good gaming rig (a64 3700+, 1GB RAM, 7800GT) and it has always worked perfectly. Then all of a sudden this afternoon I was playing WoW and the FPS drops to 1 FPS! Thought I might have a cooling problem but all the CPU, Case, and GFX temps are perfectly fine. I started to defrag my comp, and then my PC locked up! For the last 3 hours I havent been able to use my PC for more than 10 min tops without freezing! (I am writing this on another comp BTW).

I HAVE NO CLUE WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY PC! PLEASE HELP ME!
Click to expand...
 
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