Freezing, restart problems

[NZvista]

Hi, there.

Currently, my computer is booted is safe mode with networking. It is Windows vista 32bit, 2gigs ram, Asus 8600GT, Asus M3A motherboard.

What's happening? My computer had been randomly restarting/ freezing lately so I thought that I should update my graphics and sound drivers, sound driver updated fine, but i've had serious problems with my graphics driver.

Twice now, I've tried to upgrade my driver, only to have it freeze mid way, black out my screen. However, my g15 keyboard, which would stop working if it was a computer freeze still kept running, so I left my computer going, and it restarted eventually. Then it loaded a blank desktop screen, this is the same result when I tried restarting my CPU the second the driver update stalled/ black screened. (had to system restore to make it usable).

So my question is, so have I stumbled across a serious graphics card problem, or is it something else? (PS: After system restore, re downloaded updates, full system scans (nothing) and CC cleaned).

Any help would be desperately appreciated.

Thanks

 

[EXCellR8]

you may want to try disabling automatic restart on error and have the computer display a blue screen instead. This way, you can use the information from the blue screen (usually a driver listed) to diagnose the problem a little more efficiently. If it's the video driver, the "nv4_disp.dll" will be displayed near the fault information. Have you noticed any patterns at all with this freezing/restarting?

 

[xquikkiksx]

I would start by pulling all but 1 stick of RAM and anything in a PCI slot. remove your video card and use onboard video (if u have it) to see if this helps anything... if it does than piece your motherboard back together piece by piece to see if when you add a stick of RAM or your video card the problem occurs again. Than you'll have your answer if it is hardware.

Also, Vista has a hardware diagnostics program built in to the OS if you can access that it is a very helpful.

 

[NZvista]

Annoyingly, I took my cpu into the computer store and it refused to glitch.

Now back home, my computer is refusing to load with icons, sods law i guess.

My computer also, shows blue screens when they occur, so im not sure what I could do to make them showalways, i think they always do.

Ive also done Mem test/ safe mode log on.

Some guy is comming around to take my cpu away and do some tests, thanks for your advice.

 

[EXCellR8]

Well, depending on which CPU you are using, the motherboard may need a BIOS flash in order to work correctly with the processor. I can recall a case where I built a system for a friend of mine and the whole thing would completely lock up every now and then. It turned out that, even though the processor was compatible with the board, the BIOS version was too old. Once I flashed to a more recent version, which had added support for his CPU, the system worked perfectly.

This might not be the case with your setup, but I would bring it up when your CPU is being serviced.