Pc started freezing on me all the sudden

Status
Not open for further replies.
Hi,

I am new here and not very clever with computers so i came looking for help :D

My older brother went off to the army recently and gave me and our little brother his computer. he has been gone for about 4 months or so and everything was working fine up until a couple of days ago

ill post specs first i dont really know what they mean but everyone seems to be posting specs when they have a problem

it has windows xp home with sp2
p4 3.4 processor
1.5 gig of ddr
geforce 6200
omni 500 wt power charger
not sure what sort of motherboard but when i take off the side panel i can see a few of numbers and names
1.gigabyte ga 8s648fx
2.agp8x

hopefully they are the right ones.


ok so my problem is when i try and play sims 2 nightlife after 5 minutes or so the screen will stop moving but sound keeps on going. also sometimes it will restart itself once this happens.

doesnt matter what im doing it will just stop working pressing windows start button does nothing neither does cntrl alt delte. i ahve to turn it off at the switch.

i tried reinstalling sims 2 and all the sims 2 addons but that still didnt fix the problem.

my little brother said that when he plays world of warcraft the same problem happens he can oly play for about 5-10 mins before the screen will freeze and you cant do anything. you can still here sound but nothing works, you have to turn it off at the power to fix it. theres a few games on the computer so i opened them and tried my best to play them and they make the computer freeze aswell. i tried far cry, battlefeild 2 and command and conquer zero hour.

my boyfriend said it might be hot so i took the side panel off and blew a little fan into the computer and that still doesnt help it, besides when its frozen nothing feels particulary hot anyways.

i did a virus search and it found nothing and i did a system clean up and it still keeps on freezing.

so he said it might be ram so he came over and we tried all 3 sticks and they still forze. hes not very good with computers and couldnt fix it so i came here :D


any help would be greatly appreciated :D

Thanks,

Nicole

oh and also, i tried my best to make the computer freeze when not playing games and i couldnt.

i played music, put music on my ipod, burnt a blank dvd and copied a dvd onto the computer.

and i opened up alot of prgrams like flash, photoshop, dreamworks, paintshop pro, and all these other ones and it wont freeze only freezes during games.

it doesnt freeze when watching movies either.

Nicole
 
It sounds like the pc could be overheating.

Take the side off again and give it a good dust out with a cheap unused paint brush while the pc is turned off.

Let me know if that helps or not.
 
Ok i unplugged everything and brushed it out, i was suprised with how much dust came out of it. i even unplugged and pulled out everything dusted out the connections and plugged them back in.

i kept the side panel of and it still keeps freezing after 5-10 mins in sims 2 nightlife and world of warcraft :(

i didnt bother trying the other games cause im assuming they wont work either.
 
I have seen a ram module or ram slot that was going bad cause the same problem. download memtest (freeware) and test your ram. or you could try removing some of the ram and running it in different configurations with different modules.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back