system hang up?

[parminder]

hey guys, my friend has a computer which he assembled it himself about 3 months ago was working fine for good 2 months until he said he is experiencing small hang ups. one minute pc is working fine and after few seconds it hangs up and works fine again. i told him to do memtest and one of them showed a lot of errors, now we've replaced it and it worked fine for five days and does the same thing again. temps are fine they are under. memorys fine asswell, switched rams in different slots asswell. dont know if its the hard drive or the board, power suplly? anyone got a clue

[CoFree]

this is not going to help much
but
i think it could be any of those things.
im sure one of the other guys will have some input.

[MsK]

Difficult 1 to pinpoint from here - It's justa a process of elimination really... there are any number of things it could be.

It could be a hardware failure (but what hardware is failing??) / or excessive overclocking!

However.. it's more likely to be a problem with the operating system installation - perhaps a rogue program is consuming resources! or some form of malware/adware or virus is running..

Best thing to do is give it a good scan & see if anything picks up also do a HD defrag.

Perhaps the most time saving approach is :
If you have a spare HD it might be worth popping that in & doing a fresh OS install to that drive & seeing if the problem goes away - this should only take about 45mins & the process is more or less automatic
If things improve then you have nailed it - then you can easily migrate your files & profiles over to the new installation from the previous HD

[parminder]

msk man that is exactly what i was thinking as it happened to me like some 7 years ago and i reformatted and installed the windows and it worked like a charm, the only thing i m not sure is because i dont no how i fixed the hang ups except for i remember formatting the drive. i will let him know and see what he says.

thanks

[MsK]

msk man that is exactly what i was thinking as it happened to me like some 7 years ago and i reformatted and installed the windows and it worked like a charm, the only thing i m not sure is because i dont no how i fixed the hang ups except for i remember formatting the drive. i will let him know and see what he says.

thanks

Well.. if he has a 2nd drive he can just whip the old 1 out & put the new 1 in & boot off the OS disc to do a fresh install.
If this fixes the problem then he can connect the original drive back up & migrate his original profiles & personal documents back over

• http://www.google.co.uk/search?&q=migra ... windows+xp" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
  http://www.google.co.uk/search?&q=migra ... dows+vista" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Ultimatly it just depends on wether he is trying to preserve data or not...
if there's nothing worth keeping then there's no need for a 2nd drive - if he wants to keep stuff then he has the option of using another drive or partitioning his current drive & then installing to the new partition... it just depends on circumstances really

[sadalius]

If its not totally locking up, I would say yeah, its a software problem. If it was locking dead up, then I would say one of two things. Power supply or heat issues. You might check for heat problems for kicks and giggles. Checking the power supply would be easy too, if you have a spare or one you could temporarily pull from another box. But I would say MsK is onto the correct diagnosis with a slightly buggared install.

[parminder]

yeh msk ive just told him all of it, if he has more problems ill just go to his house and sort it out. yeh he can do one of the other really. with my one i have three hard drives, one with vista, other one with xp and its setup on a dual boot so i have both the options without changing the hard drive. i told him to do that but he just wants to fix that problem and use vista. let see what he says tommorow, temperature was the second thing i askd him to do after memtest, he used nvtemp and speedfan, which are showing normal temp. 32 c for core 2, and 51 for gfx. damn reminds of gettng a water cooling system. by the way i have a geforce 7300 downgraded from a 8800 gts and temps are 85 c on gfx and 31 c on cpu which is bad.

[Sesshomaru]

With memtest, be sure to let it run overnight. It needs to run 8-10 hours and make several passes before determining the RAM is good. If he gets 8+ hours with no errors then the RAM should be clean. A single pass doesn't test all parts of the RAM. Also you may want to run chkdisk or a third party HDD utility to determine the HDD's status. I would just check the scan the automatically fix file system errors box in Windows when running the Windows Error Checking. If that comes back clean then it may be software or a driver issue. I would follow suit by making sure all the mobo chipset drivers and video card drivers are up to date. These are usually found on the manufacturer's site. As far as the temps go, that doesn't appear to be the issue from what you posted. There should almost never be heat issues at stock settings unless his case just does not have good airflow. Speedfan is pretty accurate for an external temp, Core Temp is the other one I'd use to check TJunction (CPU cores). http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[MsK]

yep.. I've fixed enough pc's in my time - so much so that I can confidently say I can get myself out of most problems.
but... it really does come down to this:
outweighing the cost of time vs the need to be back up & running in the quickest amount of time

All the pc's I have fixed over the years (& there have been many) I have always successfully preserved data // but I tend to skip the "process of elimination battle" if I don't nail it within the obvious shortlist because it's just far too lengthy & time consuming... all this running: mem checks for xhours, chkdsk for x hours, virus scanning for x hours, driver checking, hardware replacements etc. soon adds up, seems back to front & is just crazy!!!

I always have a spare drive or 2 at hand & they serve me well...

I can have a new hard drive in & os installed in 45mins & if the problem persists then I can follow up with the 8+hour memcheck scans, chkdsk, temp monitoring etc. etc.

If the problem related to OS & not hardware then it's quickly resolved & I can migrate the profiles & data over from the original drive & have a sweet running, untainted system back up & running within the hour - all that is left to be done then is re-install my core software/programs, which in many ways is a good thing because we all tend to pic up shit along the way that we rarely use so it ends up being "good house keeping"

[Sesshomaru]

Yeah I know what you are saying. To a large extent you are right, however if the system errors are all over the place then it's best not to take shortcuts. I tried doing it that way and only got more headaches. I was getting errors all over the place which I believe I have tracked down to ATI driver issues on my HD3870. I went through several formats and reinstalls of known good XP SP2 and SP3 discs and still got issues. I was pulling out my hair doing tests and research. In my case I had no choice other than eliminate the single hardware components first. I made sure my RAM was good with Memtest, then checked my HDD through chkdisk and still got issues. Finally it came down to endless VPU recovers with my Radeon card. I tried updating the drivers, no luck there. So I tried out the Omega drivers, and so far, so good. The issues may reappear, but I'm hoping they are fixed. The Omega Drivers are based off an older version of Catalyst, and ATI Tray Tools does all the stuff Catalyst does and more, so hopefully all will remain good.

[sadalius]

You have to look at troubleshooting objectively. You know that if your trying something, it will do a few select things. Make it work, make it a little better, do nothing at all, or make it worse. When I am actually troubleshooting some weird problem, I usually flow chart in my mind what path I will take for each of the four possibilities. That way, I don't pull my hair out to bad if I've flowcharted a shitload

[parminder]

Yeah I know what you are saying. To a large extent you are right, however if the system errors are all over the place then it's best not to take shortcuts. I tried doing it that way and only got more headaches. I was getting errors all over the place which I believe I have tracked down to ATI driver issues on my HD3870. I went through several formats and reinstalls of known good XP SP2 and SP3 discs and still got issues. I was pulling out my hair doing tests and research. In my case I had no choice other than eliminate the single hardware components first. I made sure my RAM was good with Memtest, then checked my HDD through chkdisk and still got issues. Finally it came down to endless VPU recovers with my Radeon card. I tried updating the drivers, no luck there. So I tried out the Omega drivers, and so far, so good. The issues may reappear, but I'm hoping they are fixed. The Omega Drivers are based off an older version of Catalyst, and ATI Tray Tools does all the stuff Catalyst does and more, so hopefully all will remain good.

i do exactly the same as msk, and if i had these many errors like yours sesshamaru then i just transfer all the data to second hard drive and reformat and install fresh wiindows, nd also i install few other programmes if i need them onto the new one. i hate doing memtest, especially defrag.