PC simply freezes up.. no error messages...

[Captain]

Anyone shed light as to where to start fault finding this problem???

I have an Abit AT7 Processor PCB with AMD Athlon 2.2 CPU, two Hard Drives, 450W Power supply and G4Ti440 Graphics card plus 1Gig of Ram running XP home.
Just recently my PC simply freezes up. Mouse, keyboard Ctrl +Alt + Del is inoperative... The hard drive light stays on, the only solution is to re-power up the PC, then all's back to normal.

Any ideas where the hell to start looking for a fault like this.. It must be low level failure.. I've got a scope, but don't know where to look if there's any clock signals or something dying or maybe PSU intermittent?.

Any wizz's out there????

Regards..

Roy

 

[scorptiger]

At a guess, a hard drive going bad; but that's really just a guess. If you have or can get another drive and copy over your setup, you'll soon find out. Hard drives can be difficult to pin down when they start to go bad. A friend thought her's was good and even ran a Maxtor utility that assured her the drive was OK, but the used replacement I put in has run without incident for months now. The original drive kept losing files, which suggested to me that it was failing mechanically and the heads couldn't align correctly.

 

[SuperFly03]

Without knowing more, and from some experiance, when your HDD light goes solid, that lends creedance to a hard drive problem, though not always. I woudl definately start with yanking the hard drive and tossing it in another machine to test it (assuming you can) or trying to install windows on the spare drive. After that it could be a whole host of problems. I'm not an expert, but I would guess it could even be a bad board or CPU (not sure how but ya know lol). I don't think it will be a GPU/RAM problem, and PSU I am thinking is a stretch.