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Why would my computer keep freezing like this?

E

EmptyWallet

Gawd
Joined
Jul 9, 2001
Messages
896
Recently, whenever I'm playing a game, or listening to MP3's, or watching an mpeg movie, the computer just freezes and emits a really high pitched sound. It's random when it does it, however it does it at least 10 times a day and I have to reset. Any ideas?I'm thinking maybe some sort of hardware conflict, however its worked fine for the past 2 years and now it just started up.
 
Dying PS?
Dying MB?
Dying fan?
Dying HD?

Try to locate the source of the screaming to pin point the problem.
 
i had onboard sound that would do that... if 2 sound were played at the same time it would lock up the computer... it could be anything though.. i would first try to uninstall your soundcard and reinstall it..
 
Temps seem fine. Hmmmmm. I doubt the temp would raise that much just playing an MP3. I can start up and MP3 in any player, winamp, sonique, anything, and it will freeze after a bit. I just reinstalled the SB Live drivers, still does it when I play an MP3.
 
If you installed the Creative drivers, get rid of them. I had nothing but problems with those in my old system. The windows version of the drivers are much more stable.

Check the event viewer to see if windows recorded where the failure occured.
 
It's automatically installing the drivers when I start up. I'm assuming it is already loading the creative drivers, so , I suppose i'll find some others. I believe there are some that are kind of like the omega drivers are to vid cards? Where can I view the event viewer?
 
EmptyWallet said:
It's automatically installing the drivers when I start up. I'm assuming it is already loading the creative drivers, so , I suppose i'll find some others. I believe there are some that are kind of like the omega drivers are to vid cards? Where can I view the event viewer?
Click to expand...

I also don't understand how it wasnt' doing this for almost three years and now it just starts up. Hmmmmm.
 
Could be anything now ... it's been OCd for a good long while ...

Can you afford to reformat, and reinstall anything? Try without any of the peripherals first ... it will be easier to eliminate the hardware that's failing ...

YOu've been running your FSB out of spec for a longtime ... so could be the mobo ...
 
Try taking the sound card out.
Boot into safe mode to uninstall the drivers.
Reboot and try playing a game you know will freeze your box.
If its the sound card/ sound card drivers causeing the problem then it wont freeze with them removed.
If not then it will.

Luck......... :D
u=Tigerbiten.gif
 
This problem sounds awfully familiar... I also have the Abit KT7A Raid MB togerther with an old Radeon 64MB DDR VIVO Graphis card and used to have a SB Live! card also but changed that to an older Aureal Vortex based card because of known problems with SB Live and the KT133A chip set.

My system also worked fine for the past years but now it freezes solid randomly many times a day. It seems to happen more often on warmer weather (higher room temperature) but giving some heat with a hair dryer didn't seem to cause crashing so I doubt it would be only because of some component heating too much.

My strongest bet now lies with the electrolytic capacitors on the MB since they have been known to go bad in KT7 boards. The caps on my board are manufactured by Jackon which is a known bad brand as far as I know. The caps don't show any visual swelling but I suspect they could still be internally gone bad. So I'm considering replasing the all the caps to see if that fixes the problem... Of course that can also be just a waste of time and money, but...

I strongly recommend you to check your caps for any visual damage... Of course even better if you happen to have a high speed oscilloscope so you could check if there is any heavy transients on the CPU power feed on a high CPU load. My scope is only good to a mere 20MHz so it's hard to say how bad the transients really are on my system.

Good luck with debugging :)
 
Inspect the capacitors on the motherboard and see if any of them are leaking [brown rustlike stuff around them] The metal tops will usually bulge up a tad if the caps are bad.

I have the same board [now in the parents computer with underclocked AGP settings and card] that has 3 bad caps by the AGP slot. My lockups while playing games were driving me nuts and found out that dropping the AGP speed to 2X fixed the problem. Little did I know the caps were bad until I went to put in a new motherboard.

Now whenever I have problems, I first inspect the motherboard. Has an MSI board that had the bad caps, also. Luckily I was able to RMA that one. It was too late for the Abit so I just need to get new caps sometime for it.

If that isn't the problem..
Are you using the RAID controllers onboard? If so, do you actually have the drive in a RAID?
Try downloading the latest 4-in-1 drivers if you have not yet done so.

I had a Live 5.1 and an audigy card in mine with seemingly no problems.
 
uninstall all your sound drivers. open her up and pull out the sound card. clean it off and then re-seat it. power her up, re-install your drivers. I had this problem once with my audigy 2 platinum. never really figured out what was causing it but what this seemed to do the trick. pobably just came loose in the PCI slot.

Good luck man
 
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