Random Lock-ups/Freeze-ups; is it the Power Supply?

[pemdawg]

I'm gonna try disabling my onboard audio too if this doesnt get any better
I'm gonna try running it case open out in the living room. Where do you keep your pc, Astro?

 

[Astro]

Mine's on the floor next to the desk but I don't see how that makes any difference. This isn't a heat issue; if it was, the whole thing would shut down. What's odd is how this machine has run fine for 6 hours straight now...I just can't understand how sometimes it can't last 5 minutes up, but other times it just goes and goes and goes for hours without any problems.

If there has to be a problem, I wish it would be consistent.

 

[pemdawg]

Have you considereed a shot CPU?

 

[Astro]

That would answer a lot of questions, because the only things left that I have not replaced are the CPU, vid card, memory, and cd drives (it's not those, I know that). It froze up again this morning when I was shutting down the computer. You know, Start, Shut Down, Turn Off...it got the screen where "Saving settings..." and froze right there before it was going to shut itself off automatically.

Personally I'd like to hear what some symptoms are of a damaged CPU. If that's the problem with mine, well good - I've still got a little less than 2 years of warranty left on the P4 chip.

 

[pemdawg]

Personally, I'm not sure. Mine has frozen twice in as many days. I'm also starting to see problems with other applications, like I lost some settings in Firefox, and my Norton AV is taking a while to enable sometimes. I'm going nuts over here.

 

[pcgo]

That would answer a lot of questions, because the only things left that I have not replaced are the CPU, vid card, memory, and cd drives (it's not those, I know that). It froze up again this morning when I was shutting down the computer. You know, Start, Shut Down, Turn Off...it got the screen where "Saving settings..." and froze right there before it was going to shut itself off automatically.

Personally I'd like to hear what some symptoms are of a damaged CPU. If that's the problem with mine, well good - I've still got a little less than 2 years of warranty left on the P4 chip.[/QUOTE

I am having the same problem with my system and have only the CPU left to blame. I have a P4 3.0E ghz and the asus utility tells me that its running at
52 C/125 F when the computer is idle. Does anyone know if this is too hot for this CPU??

 

[pemdawg]

Well, its been 2 days, and I havent hada freeze up. I restored my BIOS defaults, then clocked down for a day(remember, I'm running an unlocked mobile Athlon XP). This mornng, after several reboots by me, just to test the system, it refused to freeze, so I rolled back up to 1800mhz. Not quite where I was before, but still very respectable. I will keep an eye on things though, just incase anything weird happens.

 

[Astro]

Here's a question...Are all of us who are having the freeze-up problems all using XP Service Pack 2? My cousin is having the same problem with an Athlon 2700+ and he suspects it is an SP2 issue. What does everyone else think?

I've gone 3 days without a freeze; that's why I hadn't posted since last time.

 

[pemdawg]

Hmm. Interesting thought. I am not running SP2, but I do have some ofhte XP hotfixes with "(SP2)" affixed to the end. One of those mgt have been dogging me, but Ihaveno explainaationasto why Ihave not suffered a freeze in several days.

 

[Astro]

Well mine froze again last night so I changed PCI latency in BIOS from 32 to 10. Didn't work. I've had 2 freeze-ups in the last 10 minutes. The second time, it froze up during boot-up for Windows. I know this is probably a hardware issue but I'm going to install Linux on a spare 40 gig drive I have and see how that works. I just fear that I'm approaching the point where I am just going to tear the system down and sell off the parts and buy a Dell or Alienware machine. This is absolutely ridiculous for this to happen and I can't see myself ever building another computer again after this.

 

[nein]

Well mine froze again last night so I changed PCI latency in BIOS from 32 to 10. Didn't work. I've had 2 freeze-ups in the last 10 minutes. The second time, it froze up during boot-up for Windows. I know this is probably a hardware issue but I'm going to install Linux on a spare 40 gig drive I have and see how that works. I just fear that I'm approaching the point where I am just going to tear the system down and sell off the parts and buy a Dell or Alienware machine. This is absolutely ridiculous for this to happen and I can't see myself ever building another computer again after this.

That isn't how PCI latency values are to be adjusted. If you do want to adjust them for hang-up problems, the adjustment from default MASTER in mobo BIOS should never be greater than 2 in absolute magnitude (smaller or larger), for hang-ups its would be decrements.

The latency values of all hardware devices are in multiples of 8, just as default typical PCI latency value of 32 is a multiple of 8.

 

[Astro]

Well the reason I settled on 10 is because with my old Athlon 1.2ghz, I had a Hauppauge winTV card that froze the system whenever you started the tv watching application. They said to change it from 32 to 10 and that would fix it, and it did, for that machine. That's why I changed it to 10. With it still freezing up I don't think it's that but I'll change it to 24 anyways. I have just downloaded Mepis Linux and will try running that for a while and see how it goes. If I don't have any problems I guess it's a WinXP SP2 issue. But I have a feeling the problems will continue as this computer is cursed, lol.

 

[nein]

Well the reason I settled on 10 is because with my old Athlon 1.2ghz, I had a Hauppauge winTV card that froze the system whenever you started the tv watching application. They said to change it from 32 to 10 and that would fix it, and it did, for that machine. That's why I changed it to 10. With it still freezing up I don't think it's that but I'll change it to 24 anyways. I have just downloaded Mepis Linux and will try running that for a while and see how it goes. If I don't have any problems I guess it's a WinXP SP2 issue. But I have a feeling the problems will continue as this computer is cursed, lol.

What worked for Hauppauge hardware isn't what worked for a Sound Blaster card, nor necessarily anything else. They almost never have the same identical latency responses.

 

[Astro]

Nein, and anyone else, here's the latest. Just now before this reboot the POST screen couldn't even see any hard drives or cd/dvd drives. It just stuck there until it said "No drives found." That's the same message I had a few months ago with the old power supply and the Albatron motherboard. Tell me, oh please tell me, what is causing this. It can't be a sound card that could make a system not see its own IDE drives.

I want to know if a damaged CPU (this is a Pentium 4 2.6ghz with HT) can cause a system to not be able to see its IDE drives, cause system freeze-ups, etc. It's under warranty still and I'm about ready to RMA it soon if this keeps up.

 

[pemdawg]

As a last option, you may want to try part swapping with a friend or some spare junk around the house. If you can do a part for part test and see whats causing the problems. If mine freezes again, my friend and I are gonna try swapping some parts from his machine to mine and vice-versa.

 

[nein]

Nein, and anyone else, here's the latest. Just now before this reboot the POST screen couldn't even see any hard drives or cd/dvd drives. It just stuck there until it said "No drives found." That's the same message I had a few months ago with the old power supply and the Albatron motherboard. Tell me, oh please tell me, what is causing this. It can't be a sound card that could make a system not see its own IDE drives.

Yes it could.

Your hardware is a BUS_MASTER SYMMETRIC PROCESSING design - AKA - sequential one at a time Bus_Masters controlling the system bus with an equalized time slice period called "LATENCY", for PCI devices its called "PCI LATENCY". Often also called Time-Share Processing, Time-Division Processing... Intel's trade name is Symmetric Processing.

If a Bus_Master device never let go of the system bus after the pre-assigned latency duration period for others such as IDE drives in their own turns, the computer will hang from not finding any IDE drives.

 

[Astro]

Well I understand I may now lose the respect of a lot of people here, but I admitted defeat today and purchased a Dell Dimension XPS system with a 4 year warranty. I got a $1250 discount off the regular price so I feel good about it. See folks, I'm a substitute teacher who works 4-5 days/week and now am taking night classes in order to be a full-time 2nd grade teacher this August. I have so little free time as it is now and spending all my time trying to fix this just is not going to work. So yes, after building 5 systems (4 of which are perfectly fine), I admit I've been beaten by this computer. I still plan to see what Intel says about these lock-ups and maybe try RMA-ing the P4 chip, but as they say, time is money. I need my time back and don't feel like taking a gamble on building another system. If I do eventually find out what the deal is with the existing computer, I'll post it here.

 

[RealBlackStuff]

You GAINED, rather than lost respect! Not all hardware is infallible.
Best of luck with your exams.
Hope we can be of more service some time in the future.

 

[Astro]

Thanks, I appreciate the comments. This is a great site for help and yeah there was probably more I could have tried but I was just tired of having to deal with it. Pemdawg, good luck with figuring out what is going wrong with your system.

 

[pemdawg]

Well, I can't swing another Pc, or even replacing a single part in this one, so I am still fighting. Try running Knoppix for a while. I turned off my Windows paging file, and I think it may be related to a Windows XP hotfix. If you still have the PC, try the above, and see if it freezes in Knoppix, or stops freezing after disabling your pagefile, or run offline in a clean instal of SP1 (no patches, i said offline).

 

[KhuongPhiHoang]

i have had the same problems you guys are having and i really believe that its because the cpu is just dead or weak. yes, if it was a heat issue than it would have turned off or reboot, but this one just freezes and you cant even move your mouse, and after i turn it back on i get problems, very random problems, probably because windows didnt shut down right.

at first (3 months ago) it seems like a video issue because it usually happens when i watch a movie file (especially divx), or a dvd, encode a video, etc. but then i was listing on winamp and it frooze on me, so okay, it might be a audio video issue. strangely enough when i got an IM through AIM, the loud DING frooze my comp.

i brought a new cpu motherboard combo and new stick of ram, it doesnt crash anymore. im not sure which one was defective, im sure my old ram is fine, a possiblity that it could be the motherboard, but im pretty sure it was the cpu. i do alot of things that are cpu hungry, so its pretty obvious that it was just a matter of time till it died on me.

i upgraded from a athlon xp 2100+ (1.7Ghz) to a p4 3.0Ghz, $189+tax at frys electronics. the board was an ecs, but it will do for now.

 

[pemdawg]

Wel, I'm still under warranty thru ASUS, so I'm RMA'ing the board, and as I type, my cpu is running happily in my brothers PC, and my RAM is kicking along in my friends HTPC. So I'm banking on a crap mobo. I did some research on the board I have (ASUS A7N8X-E) and a lot of people have been experiencing problems with it. I will probably sell the replacement on eBay when it arrives, and use the money to get the board my friend has, a Abit NF7-s ver2.0. He hasn't had any problems with it, and I have yet to find any forum posts with negative comments on it. We'll see what happens over the next few weeks. I dropped too muh coin on this machine to just start over, plus I have no money to do that.

 

[KhuongPhiHoang]

i have a soyo kt33 board. i thought it was the board, i flashed the bios it seemed to help for awhile than it crashed again. iono, it could be the board.

 

[rtrubshaw]

Hi am new to the forums but i am having the same problem aswell, win xp locking up no moue no keyboard the hdd isnt being accesed (well the lights not flashing anyway) total freeze, but this only happens when no programs are running, the system is fine when i have my x2 game running, it has froze once from i can remeber when on the net. When i first got this computer it would randomly freeze no matter what was happening phoned up mesh (who i bought the comp from) and they said i should doa windows reinstall, did this and it has worked for past 6 months, then had a problem where the hdd was no longer recognised so had to reinstall that (its a sata hdd) and format and reinstall windows and now the problem is back except it only crashes when windows is doing nothing, any ideas about what i can do to fix it.

 

[KhuongPhiHoang]

im not positive but what caused my problem MAY have been a fault controller card. but yea i brought a new motherboard cpu combo so im not positive. i cant recreate the problem.