This ain't right... PC problems

[Barry the Sprout]

My PC is really playing up at the moment. Whenever I turn it on it works fine for a few minutes and then completely freezes. Nothing happens on screen, the mouse won't move and windows stop loading. The only way I've found to get out of it is to turn the computer off completely and then turn it back on again. But it appears to be happening more and more now. Very annoying.

So I thought I'd post to see if anyone knew what it might be thats causing this. If anyone recognises the symptoms then any information they have is helpful. Other than that do any of you have any idea what I should do about it? Carry on as normal and hope it goes away? Take it to a repair shop? Throw it out the window and scream "I will show you the life of the mind!" at it repeatedly? (Bonus points if you can get that reference)

Thanks.

[Melusine]

I might be - OK I probably AM saying something stupid and over-obvious, but when I had that problem, I looked at the cooler (which was fine), then ran scandisk and defragged the HD, and that worked for quite a long while. Then when the same problem occurred again and defragging/cleaning up the HD with scandisk wasn't enough... so then I bit the sour apple and re-formatted the HD and reinstalled Windows.
Doubt that helps... sorry! Good luck with it. [img]smile.gif[/img]

[andrewas]

Power supply. Overheating. Dodgy RAM.

See if you can get some monitoring software for your mobo, that should let you see the various voltages in the PC, as well as the temps. Try running with the case off, that should lower the temps and if thats the problem you should see some improvement. As for dodgy RAM, try removing one of the sticks, and run with various combinations. If you only have the one stick see if you can't borrow one from someone.

[Barry the Sprout]

Don't know if this has any relevance but I have a sneaky suspicion about the overheating you mentioned. I quite recently had to get my fan replaced, so maybe I got ripped off on the replacement? That was about a month ago though, and this problem hasn't been happening for that long. Anyway, I'll have a go with the stuff you suggested. Cheers.

[Zuvio]

Originally posted by Barry the Sprout: Don't know if this has any relevance but I have a sneaky suspicion about the overheating you mentioned. I quite recently had to get my fan replaced, so maybe I got ripped off on the replacement? That was about a month ago though, and this problem hasn't been happening for that long. Anyway, I'll have a go with the stuff you suggested. Cheers.

Maybe this is redundant, but: whenever you change a fan/cooler combination, it's very wise to re-apply some coolingpaste on the bottom of the cooler first, since the old paste is likely to be hard or scraped off. SO instead of thinking that you have massive cooling due to your large cooler, it may be even worse because isn't dissapated as well as before. Just a suggestion...

[andrewas]

Stock goop is very forgiving in that regard, but yeah, if you take the 'sink off put new paste under it, because you will not get an efficient thermal junction with the old stuff. But if you just replaced the fan without dismounting the sink, it should be OK.