My PC recently has gone through a phase of freezing up. I could be doing anything from writing a word document to surfing the web when all of a sudden the little orange light on the front (guessing this is the hard drive light) which normally flickers goes on constantly and the whole PC freezes in the middle of what i'm doing?

Just wondering if anyone else has had this problem at all? If so what was their solution.

My PC spec is as follows:

AMD Athlon XP 2400+
512MB RAM
ATI Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro Atlantis Graphics Card
Microsof XP Home Edition
Office XP Pro
80GB Main Hard drive (XP, Programs etc...)(60GB unused)
80GB secondary drive (Pics, movies etc...)(30GB unused)
DVD W/R
CD W/R
Coolmaster Musketeer System Dynamics Detector
Coolmaster Aero 4 CPU cooler
Akasa Hard Disk Cooler (1 on each)
Vantec Spectrum Graphics Card Cooler
Akasa System Exhaust Blower
2 x 80mm fans. One at the rear blowing inward & one on the side extracting.

Motherboard - ASUSTek A7N266VM
Bios - Award Software inc A7N266-VM ACPI Bios Rev 1006

I've got XP service Pack 2 and all applicaple updates & i'm running Norton Antivirus & Firewall. I also have Norton Systemworks as well (both 2004 with updates).

Anyone?

Cheers

MAFFA

 

Well mate i had a similair problem and found out it was Service Pack 2 for Windows that was causing me all the hassle worth a try re-installing windows and NOT in-stalling Service Pack 2 it worked fine for me !!!! (just and idea matey)



Pongo555

 

It seems a bit strange that it's only gone wrong now though? I installed it months ago?

MAFFA

 

I had similar problems and found somewhere that suggested changing the memory voltage setting in the BIOS.

My bios memory voltage was set to 1.65V and the site suggested changing it to 1.5V if you had 1.5V memory.

I didn't bother checking the DIMMS but changed the voltage setting to 1.5V and hey presto no crashes since.

A friend also had similar problems and same fix sorted his system out.

Worth a try

 

usual signs that hard drive is failing. Be prepared!

 

before you start formatting drives and pressing the panic button - turn the indexing service off.

Also defrag the hard drive while you're at it.

 

Might be worth checking your memory usage. Open task manager and under the performance tab if teh commit charge is greater than your physical memory, the PC will often freeze.
Either stop some programs/services running in the background to free up memory or upgrade your memory.

 

Kieran - What is the indexing service?

I checked & the commit charge isn't greater than the physical memory but I also opened up the PC to be faced with a ton of dust clogging up all the fans etc... Thought while I was al it I would give it a good clean out & funnily enough it hasn't crashed since?? I'm not counting my chickens yet though!

On the voltage side of things it's currently 1.7v

One thing i'm not sure about though is all the programs running in the background? When I open task mgr there's 51 processes showing!! When I get a mo i'll list them so someone can tell me what I can & can't close, as i've no idea??

MAFFA

 

Regarding the memory voltage i initially thought my problems were temperature related as well. With the side covers removed the interval between crashes went up but it still crashed.

Cheers

Mark

 

My PC used to crash due to overheating until I put all the fans in All 7 of them LOL Maybe it was temperature related again but purely because all the fans were clogged up with dust & not working properly??

Anyway here's all the processes running in the background with the mem usage:

msmsgs.exe (9,852k)
taskmgr.exe (5,312k)
wuauclt.exe (8,656k)
iexplore.exe (35,868k)
wmplayer.exe (8,412k)
msim.exe (21,724k)
CalCheck.exe (2,956k)
CKA.exe (8,216k)
LiveUpdate.exe (5,520k)
msnmsgr.exe (7,348k)
ctfmon.exe (3,336k)
AcctMgr.exe (9,904k)
GhostStartTrayAPP.exe (2,328k)
CCAPP.EXE (15,804k)
atiptaxx.exe (15,804k)
qttask.exe (2,392k)
QveCplSk.exe (5,060k)
dragdial.exe (3,136k)
msnappau.exe (5,740k)
realsched.exe (180k)
jusched.exe (2,052k)
NVATray.exe (2,588k)
capFax.exe (1,832k)
explorer.exe (11,364k)
alg.exe (3,560k)
SymWSC.exe (4,152k)
ups.exe (2,528k)
wdfmgr.exe (1,788k)
symlcsvc.exe (776k)
svchost.exe (4,556k)
NOPDB.exe (4,184)
SAVSCAN.EXE (152k)
NAVAPSVC.EXE (8,596k)
GHOSTS-2.EXE (2,308k)
CCPROXY.EXE (5,980k)
spoolsv.exe (4,688k)
CCEVTMGR.EXE (3,180k)
SNDSrvc.exe (4,104k)
CCSETMGR.EXE (4,288k)
svchost (4,528k)
svchost (3,324k)
svchost (27,012k)
svchost (4,544k)
svchost (5,080k)
ati2evxx.exe (2,312k)
Isass.exe (952k)
services.exe (4,288k)
winlogon.exe (940k)
csrss.exe (4,448k)
smss.exe (372k)
ati2evxx.exe (2,260k)
System (224k)
System Idle Process (16k)

Right that's the lot Phew!! Hopefully someone can tell me if there's anything not needed out of this lot

MAFFA

 

Well...f you do think it's your hard disk on the way out download the diagnostics program from your hard drive maker's site and give it a scan. Deffo worth it, some places (Maxtor) tend to replace their wrecked hard disks with bigger ones...ie I sent off an 80 an they gave me a 120 back!

 

Go to Computer management (start, right click my computer choose computer management) services. look down the list stop and disable indexing service.

It speeds up searching your hard drive but indexing the location of files - this is if you have a desparate need to find a file quickly, but it has the really annoying habit of picking stupid times to do so.