my PC freezes up all the time!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Yazmine L Tyler
  • Start date Start date
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Yazmine L Tyler

Hi,

My Pentium 3 PC runs on NT 4.0. Two to three times a day, the PC freezes up,
where the mouse and keyboard just freeze, and I have to turn off the computer.
Once the PC reboots, everything works fine for a few hours, and then, the same
thing occurs all over again.

I took out the old memory and put in a known good working 128 Mb RAM. The
problem still occurs.

I believe 1 of the following is causing the problem:

1) defective P3 Intel chip
2) defective mother board
3) defective mouse
4) PC is getting too hot

But how can I easily determine what's causing this problem? I don't have an
extra P3 chip to test with. Thanks in advance.
 
You are on the right track. Checking the memory is a pretty good start.
Next I would go for checking the temperature and voltage with MBM. You can
download it at http://mbm.livewiredev.com/
It will show you the temp and I would also check the voltages to see if
maybe you have a bad power supply.
 
also maybe some burn in software (sandra 2004 www.sisoftware.net) to get
some data flowing through the hardware. individual tests so you can test
just the CPU, or just the ram.

maybe 3dmark/aquamark for GFX loading.

tim
 
Yazmine said:
Hi,

My Pentium 3 PC runs on NT 4.0. Two to three times a day, the PC freezes up,
where the mouse and keyboard just freeze, and I have to turn off the computer.
Once the PC reboots, everything works fine for a few hours, and then, the same
thing occurs all over again.

I took out the old memory and put in a known good working 128 Mb RAM. The
problem still occurs.

I believe 1 of the following is causing the problem:

1) defective P3 Intel chip
2) defective mother board
3) defective mouse
4) PC is getting too hot

But how can I easily determine what's causing this problem? I don't have an
extra P3 chip to test with. Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

I would not rule out a flakey power supply.
 
I had a similar problem with an NT 4.0 server system. In particular the
problem seemed to be aggrivated by audio clips. I was using a SB Live card
and all patches were current. I did a clean install of Win2K server on the
same hardware, and the problem is gone. While running the NT OS I frequently
got buffer overrun notices for the keyboard and mouse. Perhaps you are
getting these?

You biggest issue is the oldest troubleshooting questiion for computing:
hardware or software? Keep an open mind. I recently wasted three days
chasing a software solution when the underlying problem was a faulty
motherboard. If you can swing it and are comfortable with getting inside
your system box, consider temporarily replacing your system disk with a
cheap used one and building a Win98 or Win2K system on that disk. If the
problem shows with the newly installed OS, I'd say you have a solid case for
a hardware based problem.
 
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