WinXP Pro freezes

[19giugno]

Hi all,
on a pc of a friend, all of a sudden while using it, win xp freezes, there is nothing we can do but turning it off. The mouse icon freezes and the keyboard does not respond; CTRL+ALT+DEL produces no effects. It happens 4-5 times during a day, while doing different things: working with office applications, browsing the internet, reading emails. Antivirus (norton) is OK.

The bad thing is that there is no error message on the even viewer...

What could I check?

Thanks,
D.

 

[Nostromo]

Hello there,

First thing I would recommend would be press F8 when booting up and select to boot windows in safe mode. If Windows doesn't lock up then it could be a device driver that is casing the problem, to check this access device manager and look for any devices that display a ! to say they are not installed correctly.
If you have installed any updated device drivers lately then try rolling these back as they may be incompatible with the hardware or for another version of Windows.

Secondly I would run chkdsk or scandisk on the C: drive to check for any disk errors and perform a full anti-virus and anti-spyware check.

Hope the above helps, please let me know how you get on.

Thanks.

 

[caravel]

Seems like more of a hardware issue. WinXP will usually show you some kind of error message, BSoD or produce a dump file. A complete freeze up usually always points to a hardware problem. Check your CPU temperature. Open your case and clean out all the fans, then run memtest for several hours. Does your HDD make any strange noises just before the crash? If it does then it may be an overheating HDD causing the lock up.