My computer has been freezing. The odd part to me is that the pointer is still functional, but I can't interact with anything, just move it around. The only thing that seems to (pretty) reliably cause the lockup is if I run multiple graphic-intensive programs at once, like playing a game one one monitor while having photoshop open on the other. The problem can occur however, doing something as simple as browsing Hatrack. I reformatted my hard drive, which seemed to fix the problem for a few months, but it's now returned.
Let's see, I'm not entirely certain what information would be pertinent here. I'm running Windows XP media center on hardware I assembled myself. It has an Athlon 64 X2 dual core, and 2 GB of memory. I replaced my graphics card around the time I reformatted, so I'm fairly certain that isn't the culprit. If there's anything else that would be helpful, I'm happy to provide it.
I've done some google searching, but nothing really seems helpful. I know trying to provide technical help in this way can be bothersome, but any ideas you all have for diagnosing the problem would really be fantastic. Thanks in advance.
[ March 16, 2009, 11:43 AM: Message edited by: Juxtapose ]
Posted by Boris (Member # 6935) on :
I'd recommend running chkdisk and seeing if it has to fix anything. Since formatting fixed it, but it came back after a while (in combination with the lockup symptoms), it sounds very much like a Hard Drive issue to me. There may be a bad sector on the drive that causes it to constantly attempt a read at certain times, which in turn results in a periodic lockup. Running a chkdisk(also scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors. Will take a while but should help) should fix the issue.
Posted by Juxtapose (Member # 8837) on :
It just finished running, so I'll see how it goes. Thanks very much for the recommendation. Posted by scifibum (Member # 7625) on :
One other thought, since it usually happens during processor intensive tasks: You could have a heat problem. There are utilities you can run to monitor heat on the CPU and graphics processors. You could keep an eye on those values when you're doing intensive tasks.
If your CPU gets too hot it can lead to crashes. I haven't seen it happen in a way that allows the pointer to keep working...(shrug). One idea.
If it's not a hard disk or processor overheat issue, you might be down to good old troubleshooting. Disabling startup programs one at a time, swapping out components one at a time. Sounds fun, right? (If the problem only happens at long intervals then it can be completely maddening to try this kind of troubleshooting.)
Posted by Juxtapose (Member # 8837) on :
The intervals can be hours or minutes. The only reason I haven't tried switching out parts is because I don't have any to try with, unfortunately.
The CPU idea strikes me as unlikely (I have a pretty beefy heatsink/fan) but I'll go looking for a utility. It certainly can't hurt.
Posted by scifibum (Member # 7625) on :
I like SIW. Your motherboard manufacturer might also provide one.
Posted by Juxtapose (Member # 8837) on :
SIW seems like a nifty program. I'll try running it while I play a game to see what it does to my core temp.
In the meantime, it froze again, then refused to boot up for a while, either giving me a disk error message or sitting at the Windows loading screen forever. I ran chkdsk on the other partition for my hard drive so we'll see if that helps.
Posted by Juxtapose (Member # 8837) on :
So I'm not sure which of the solutions here worked, but it's been a couple of weeks and my comp hasn't crashed once.
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