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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well, I got my board back, ASUS says it found no problems. I bought a new 550W PSU, and set everything back up. It froze a few times last week, but its been god since then. So I really don't know. I'm gonna chalk it up to a few things. I noticed odd CPU usage issues with Motherboard Monitor, so I sh*tcanned that, and it sems to have stopped freezing since then. Also after the PC got ccustomed to my new PSU things have improved a lot. I think its a combination of issues. But so far, all sems well. I will keep up with this thread probably as long as I have this PC, so please feel free to continue posting with your problems.

Just had one this morning while surfing with Firefox.. Guess I can't blame the power supply. Maybe its a karma issue. Anyone else have lots of bad things happen to them leading up to the PC going down? I know I have. Money problems, unfulfilling job, marital strife, dead cars. Let me know.

I'm having a similiar problem. My pc used to run fine until the other day when it just froze during a game. It happened more frequently after that, sometimes even when I start up windows. I can sometimes run the pc for hours without any problems but other times it can't last for 5 minutes, usually when I play music or a game. Temperatures seem fine, anything from 36C-55C. No error or warnings in the eventviewer, I'm stumped. Guess I'm going to format and see if it solves anything.

P4 2.8HT
Intel D865PERL
Radeon 9800 Pro
Soundmax Integrated Digital Audio
512MB RAM (Don't know which brand - no problems on memtest though)
1 x 120GB Seagate ATA 7200RPM
1 x 160GB Seagate ATA 7200RPM
300W Power Supply

Ati ??

Hi guys,

is everyone having problems using ATI cards ?

I have had similar freezing problems for the last 2 years now. This is a very familiar problem to me.

My solution always has been to change the videocard to a Geforce. All problems disappeared. There were times where I could have openend a hardware shop at home due to the number of hardware components I had at home for testing.

Right now I am again having this problem since I changed to a new PCIe system.
What I found out so far is that it seems to be some kind of a problem between a TV card an ATI card and some kind of dualcore processing.

On my earlier systems it was a combination of an ATI AGP card and a HT enabled P4. Now it is an ATI PCIe card on an AMD dualcore system.

Same effects: freezes.

On my old system the solution was to either deactivate HT in the BIOS or change the ATI card to a Geforce card. I chose the latter.

Now on my new system I probably will do the same. The problem certainly gets better if I do not install the Hauppauge TV card but I am not sure if it disappears completely.

I wrote ATI mails two years ago about this issue, they refused to accept it. Since the problem disappeared completely if I change to a Geforce card I always assumed it was an ATI issue. It could very well be a problem with ATI and TV cards only on dualcore systems or systems with HT active.

I am just wondering why this is still an issue more than two years after I posted this thread in the AVS forums.

Of course I had a completely different system back then but the main thing consistent over the years was the fact that a TV card was inside the system and an ATI card was used with dualcore processing active.

This thread above is read only, it is in an archive ...

If anyone of you has access to an ATI support person who REALLY cares, maybe he/she could drop him a line ? I am done with ATI support :zzz:

Bye,
Alex

im not sure why this problem is not solved either.

ive purchased a new cpu+motherboard combo and used the old one to build a new system for my brother, he does not have this problem at all.

i switched to a higher nvida card, and same problem. both cards on my brother computer will not cause it to crash.

the only thing that seems to help is to NOT install the video card drivers, the screen turns off and on, rather than freeze, although it does freeze once a month or so, but most the time the comp freeze for a quick second and then the screen turns off and on.

i pretty much replaced everything and im still getting the same thing, i just learned to accept it. the only it could possibly be is the monitor, and i have a hard time believing it could be the monitor. new combo, newer video card, new harddrive, new psu. the only old component i have is the monitor, ps/2 mouse, floppy, and some cables. switched from athlon xp to p4 HT, same problem.

this sucks.

Hi again,

well, this time I really managed to find the cause of the freezes. It was the Hauppauge PVR500 TV card.

As soon as I removed the card, the freezes disappeared. It did not matter on which PCI slot the card was. It shared an IRQ with some other component on each slot.

Actually my old tvcard was from Pinnacle and I also had those freezes in that one, except back then they did not happen with a geforce card.

So is there anyone using a dualcore/Hyperthreading system with a tvcard not having those freezes once in a while ?

I guess I should try one of those USB TV cards ?

Bye,
Alex