Screen freezes up every hour! Help!

  • Thread starter Thread starter John Smith
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J

John Smith

I have an Asus A7N266 motherboard (nForce-based), with onboard gfx. I have
512mb DDR (266Mhz) and an Athlon XP 2400+ processor.
My problem is this: About an hour (this varies) after I switch the computer
on, the display just freezes up, and nothing in the image shown changes. I
am unable to use the mouse and the keyboard. But I can eject my CDROM. This
happens on Windows and on Linux, so I don't think it's a software problem.
What could cause this kind of problem? Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
John.
 
| I have an Asus A7N266 motherboard (nForce-based), with onboard gfx. I have
| 512mb DDR (266Mhz) and an Athlon XP 2400+ processor.
| My problem is this: About an hour (this varies) after I switch the
computer
| on, the display just freezes up, and nothing in the image shown changes. I
| am unable to use the mouse and the keyboard. But I can eject my CDROM.
This
| happens on Windows and on Linux, so I don't think it's a software problem.
| What could cause this kind of problem? Any help would be appreciated.
| Thanks,
| John.

Could be heat.

You might want to open up the case and blow some air on and see if it still
fails in an hour.

If it doesn't then you have to start narrowing down what's over heating.
 
Yes could be heat.... do u notice things going haywire just before the
freeze?? That is usually the sign of the fan on the processor not
working or cooling fast enough.

Another thing to check might be your screen saver or whatever that
might be activating after 1 hour on your system. Maybe there's a
memory management conflict which crashes the computer.
 
These are all the things I have (unsuccessfully) tried:
1. Changing the RAM from one slot to the other.
2. Tightening all cables
3. Opening the case and putting it right under my air conditioner
4. Opening the case and directing a fan into it

I have checked that all fans on the case and on the processor are working.
My CPU/motherboard temperature monitoring utility shows nothing unusual (CPU
= 44 C/ 111 F; motherboard = 33 C/ 91 F).

I am completely at a loss what to try next. I'll try any ideas, and any
advice will be appreciated.

Thanks,
John.
 
Is there anything u do just before it freezes?

What kind of programs are you loading into memory? in Start->Run type
msconfig... go to the last tab and remove any unnecessary shit from
memory and reboot. See if it works.

If not, take a look at the systems configuration menu under whatever
operating system u are using... is there a conflict with any device?
 
The time of freezing seems entirely arbitrary - The computer has frozen up
when I was typing something, when I have left the computer idling to get
some coffee, when I am playing games.

Actually, it freezes up just as well in Windows as well as in Linux.

One striking thing though is that running a game is a sure-fire way of
freezing the computer up in under 5 minutes. I thought that playing a game
might be heating the processor & onboard graphics chip up, but the computer
also freezes up when the computer is idling and the temperature monitor
shows nominal readings.
 
I have a 1gig swap, and swap usage is very minimal. I will try scanning the
disk for errors to see if there's a problem there...
 
I have a 1gig swap, and swap usage is very minimal. I will try scanning the
disk for errors to see if there's a problem there...
Click to expand...

Ass-u-me'ing that you're running XP or W2K:

Right after the next freeze, immediately boot back up and in Control Panel,
go into Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer -> System.

See if there's an event recorded at the time of the freeze. I used the
same method to track down a hardware fault (SCSI controller) that was
giving me hard freezes on my W2K box).

-Jeff B.
yeff at erols dot com
 
Recently had a similar problem on a Intel D850GB box I built. I would first
strip system down to bare bones, video card and hard drive. Reload Operating
system and get a performance testing software to run some tests (I used
Passmark benchmarking software). Let it run through all tests several times
if it passes you have software/ driver issue, if it fails on particular test
you should be able to narrow down to particular item test is failing on. My
system would lock-up intermittently when heavy demand for 3d graphics were
placed on system, the event viewer in Xp was of no use since the system
would lock and prevent any message sent to viewer. I ended up going through
a replacement card as well until fixed. You may want to look at memory as
well, make sure it is in proper slot, use high grade system memory, may even
want to try to swap out with additional stick. Memory costs are down now so
even if not issue you would end up with additional memory for system
 
| I have an Asus A7N266 motherboard (nForce-based), with onboard gfx. I have
| 512mb DDR (266Mhz) and an Athlon XP 2400+ processor.
| My problem is this: About an hour (this varies) after I switch the
computer
| on, the display just freezes up, and nothing in the image shown changes. I
| am unable to use the mouse and the keyboard. But I can eject my CDROM.
This
| happens on Windows and on Linux, so I don't think it's a software problem.
| What could cause this kind of problem? Any help would be appreciated.
| Thanks,
| John.

Get one of the free memory test programs available on the web and run that
for a couple of hours and see if you're getting RAM errors.

The two I've used are memtest86 and docmemory. Do a Google search if you
don't already hove one or both of these utilities.
 
I used a spare video card I had lying around instead of the onboard
graphics. Still have the same problem.
 
The event viewer shows nothing amiss.

Yeff said:
Ass-u-me'ing that you're running XP or W2K:

Right after the next freeze, immediately boot back up and in Control Panel,
go into Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer -> System.

See if there's an event recorded at the time of the freeze. I used the
same method to track down a hardware fault (SCSI controller) that was
giving me hard freezes on my W2K box).

-Jeff B.
yeff at erols dot com
Click to expand...
 
I've replaced the video card, but that doesn't help. I'm going to try
swapping out the memory. Hope that fixes it...
 
Thanks for all the very helpful replies. Changing my AGP aperture size from
64MB to 256MB solved the problem. No idea why it did, though.
 
sounds like you may have a bad memory module.....you have set aside much memory for video now and since it won't or doesn't need to
use it, it lays dormant?
 
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