PC Keeps Freezing - Please Help Me Troubleshoot

[blinkstary]

Hello all. I hope some of you tech savvy people might be able to help me figure this out ...

My specs:
XP Pro Service Pack 3
Intel Core2Duo E8400 (running at 35c idle)
MSI MS-7267 MB, i945G chipset, 2 gigs DDR2
onboard graphics--Intel 82945G chipset
Xfi audio card

Relevant (hopefully) history:

My old video card started to die on me ... graphic corruption in games, then some graphic corruption even in the BIOS while booting up ... pulled the card, switched to onboard video--no more graphic corruption. So far so good. A couple days later I swap out my old Core2Duo 6500 CPU for the E8400 ... I tried to keep my old heatsink, since it was better than the one that came with the E8400, but I couldn't manage to mount it ... discover that the plastic feet are splayed and won't fit in the holes in the motherboard. Hope that I didn't damage the motherboard. Switch to default heatsink, install CPU, boot up, all goes well, temps are good ... but the new CPU is not running at the correct speed. Instead of running at 3.00GHz, it is running at 333x6, or 2.00GHz, even under load. Can not find a way in the BIOS to set it to the correct speed ...

Then my PC starts randomly locking up. Mouse freezes, can't control/alt/delete ... nothing. Have to flip the on/off switch to restart it. This sometimes happens while booting up, sometimes it happens after a couple of hours of normal use ...

I tried flashing the BIOS to see if that would get the MB to set my CPU at the correct speed but the MSI BIOS flasher won't work ... I'm not sure how to trouble shoot this and it's getting a little frustrating ....

Any ideas? Theories? Questions? Any input most welcome!

 

[kimsland]

This may sound a little silly but have you tried removing 1 Ram card and then running Bios Setup Defaults (and Save and Exit)
If this then works, turn back off and put the other Ram card in

Its just that I've seen Ram cause stranger things

 

[blinkstary]

This may sound a little silly but have you tried removing 1 Ram card and then running Bios Setup Defaults (and Save and Exit)
If this then works, turn back off and put the other Ram card in

Its just that I've seen Ram cause stranger things

Thanks a lot for responding, kimsland!

Haven't tried pulling a ram card yet. But I did go into the BIOS to try to get the CPU to run at its rated speed ... still working on that, but in the meantime it seems to have stopped locking up. I wonder if running it too slowly was causing problems?

 

[levithomas]

compatibility issues

I understand that you want to run your new CPU E8400, but you might find that
its not compatible with an old Intel chipset (945) only research will tell you.
Flashing the bios is the only thing you can do in hopes that it will run at its default speed. You mentioned that you had problems with your cpu fan/heatsink make
sure its mounted properly, It should be bending the mainboard a bit because its
applying a lot of pressure on the cpu.