PC Pals Forum
Technical Help & Discussion => Windows PCs & Software: Help, News & Discussion => Topic started by: sally77 on August 14, 2005, 14:18
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Please please please can somebody help me!
I have got xp home edition running on my pc with celeron cpu, and for last few months my pc keeps freezing if left idle!
if i just leave the pc on for anything from 15/20 mins, to 3 or 4 hours, the desktop completely freezes, and nothing will wake it up at all. I have to literally switch off from the mains as even the reset button doesnt work. I have switched all the power saving options off, and screen saver etc as it was happening then too, where the system would go into standby and i couldnt wake it up at all. I have checked my event viewer, and no errors around the time of freezing whatsover.
Most of the time this happens when the pc is doing nothing at all, so there is nothing using up the memory or cpu. But yesterday i was downloading a movie, left the pc running doing that, and when it was 95% downloaded, my desktop/pc just froze and i lost the lot! I am on telewest broadband, and it has happened a couple of times while just browsing on the net, where everything, again, just freezes on me.
I have checked all my cards/ram etc are seated properly, and its now driving me insane!
i dont know what else to do!
:(
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Hi Sally and :welcome:
Thats probably going to be a bit of a pain to sort out unfortunately :(
The first thing that I would check would be the memory.
Theres a program called memtest that you can boot the pc up with to test it available from here :
http://www.memtest86.com/
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ok, downloaded that, and ran it.... let it do the test 4 times, and no errors came up, had 4 passes....?
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You're not running on a network are you, Sally?
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no, not at all.... just the one pc here!
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These are notoriously difficult to solve, but it could possibly be a rogue program or some sort of spyware - have you done a complete virus scan and spyware check, with something like Ad Aware and / or Spybot?
Ad Aware (http://www.lavasoft.de/)
Spybot S&D (http://www.safer-networking.org/)
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yes, i run adaware and spybot regularly, got avg antivirus, and done all the checks i could possibly do.....!
i know from looking at other threads and forums that this is not the most straight forward of problems, but i'm hoping somebody out there can help me!! I've only had this pc since may, and its been doing it from more or less day one, and i'm running out of options.... :( :( :(
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ummm if thats the case then it could well be some form of hardware error, any odd noises at all?
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not that i've noticed, no....?
BUT, i dont know if its relevant, but i know the hard drive is pretty noisy at times.... u can hear it 'whirring' quite loudly, if you know what i mean. It could be normal for all i know, but i do know that the hard drive i had previously never made a sound, where as this one is pretty noisy?
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i doubt it is - hard disks often make noises but if it is making "clickling" noises this had indicate a problem with the cylinders - I think you should investigate other things, like sandra suggested first.
Where did you get the pc from?
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no there is no clicking noises, so that should be ok then.
and i have already tried the memory test as sandra suggested and all was ok.
I built the pc myself, with all brand new motherboard, cpu, memory etc. everything was got from same place and compatibility all checked out, from local pc shop.
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so what are the specs of your machine then?
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i'm not very good at this now, so you'll have to bear with me on this!
i know its a celeron 2000 cpu (P4), 80gb hard drive, 512 ram, what else do u need to know?
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the motherboard might be useful.... u said this problem occured since you built it, do you know what psu rating you have? it could be that you just dont have enough power going into it. what type of graphics card do you have?
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Hi Sally and :welcome: to pcpals.
Have you looked in your startup folder to see if there is anything starting up that you are not familiar with.
I had something like this before and I had picked up spyware that got into my startup folder and made pc freeze for no reason.
adaware didn't pick it up and I had to remove it manually.
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right, here we go, the motherboard is a P4M266 - 8235, the video card is NVDIA GeForce4MX 4000, and as for the power supply unit, without opening up my pc to have a look at it, i couldnt tell you. I will take a look at that....
thanks lona, but cant see anything in there that i dont recognise? i dont think so anyway.... :?
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might be worth taking the side off the case and making sure the CPU (Processor) fan is doing its job, if this fails it'll cause the CPU to overheat and will crash/halt windows.
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it could just be that it is all too hot... by taking the side of the case off even if the cpu fan is working it should cool the internal temperature down. when you built the machine did you put any case fans in?
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yes, checked cpu fan, was one of first things i was advised to check, as cpu temperature was running up to about 47 degrees at times, cpu fan is definitely working. was then advised by pc shop that my cpu could safely run up to a lot higher temperature than this, so therefore i didnt need new fan? (good/bad advice i'm yet to find out!).
As for case fan, yes, i did install one, and that is working perfectly at moment, internal case temperature is normally around 27 degrees roughly....
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u can go hotter without a problem.
sounds fine!! ummm what type of hard drives? have you downloaded all the windows updates?
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hard drive is an 80gb, with one partition, and yes, i've downloaded all updates, and checked all drivers are up to date too....
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model of hardrive is hitachi HDS722580VLAT20......
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If all your hardware seems to be OK, then it could point to misbehaving software. Just a thought, but have you tried running it in Safe Mode, to see if it still freezes?
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no i haven't, purely because its happens so irregularly, that it would mean starting up my pc in safe mode all the time in order to wait for it to happen? but i can try doing that for a while to see if anything does happen.... other than that, i think i'm stuffed!
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Well, you may only need to do it the once, and leave it a few hours or over night, to see if it still freezes.
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ok i will give it a go....