Having freezing problems

[thebratprince001]

I'm having problems with my system suddenly that don't seem cut and dry to the cause (in my experiences). My system has been randomly freezing while playing games, watching shows (through my tv out line to my tv), surfing the web and pretty much anything else i do on my system. Last week I was playing a game and in the middle windows alerted me saying my video card drivers were no longer compatible with XP and shoved me into the lowest resolution settings. I installed a newer version of the drivers and haven't had that problem again. Sometimes when I reboot from a freeze it takes hitting the reset button a couple times to get Windows to fully boot back up and I may be hearing a clicking noise when this happens. Last night I was using Office and my LCD screen started going between a blank black screen and back to the desktop with "no signal" being displayed. While it does this i can't select anything and my mouse icon sticks to something from Office so I end up having to reboot.

For the record my CPU temp is fine and so are my drive temps. Drives run around 45 F and my CPU 37 F

I'm really narrowing all this down to either one or multiple hardware failures. The PSU which is 3 years old and I run my system 24/7, my video card which gets extensive use because of the tv-out but is only a little over a year old (card fan is working) and my 80 gig hard drive which is about 4 years old.
I'm leaning mostly towards my video card with all the recent display issues and system freezes can be due to video cards.
Everything else in my system has been purchased less than 3 months ago this didn't start happening until a couple weeks ago. Multiple reinstalls of windows hasn't fixed it for 2 different 80gig drives I swapped. Strange that both SEEM to click when I reboot from freezes. But to me most of this points towards the video card with a few symptoms that seem out of character.

 

[rgeist554]

That clicking noise is probably your HD, which is bad. HDI (Head to Disk Interference) could be causing those hang-ups. Power Supply is also an option, what brand is it? Are you over clocking at all?

It may be the video card, but I don't think it would cause your entire system to lock-up. Especially not during boot up. That sounds like HD, RAM, or CPU. Have you tried resetting your BIOS just in case something got messed up?

 

[badge]

I'm having problems with my system suddenly that don't seem cut and dry to the cause (in my experiences). My system has been randomly freezing while playing games, watching shows (through my tv out line to my tv), surfing the web and pretty much anything else i do on my system. Last week I was playing a game and in the middle windows alerted me saying my video card drivers were no longer compatible with XP and shoved me into the lowest resolution settings. I installed a newer version of the drivers and haven't had that problem again. Sometimes when I reboot from a freeze it takes hitting the reset button a couple times to get Windows to fully boot back up and I may be hearing a clicking noise when this happens. Last night I was using Office and my LCD screen started going between a blank black screen and back to the desktop with "no signal" being displayed. While it does this i can't select anything and my mouse icon sticks to something from Office so I end up having to reboot.

For the record my CPU temp is fine and so are my drive temps. Drives run around 45 F and my CPU 37 F

I'm really narrowing all this down to either one or multiple hardware failures. The PSU which is 3 years old and I run my system 24/7, my video card which gets extensive use because of the tv-out but is only a little over a year old (card fan is working) and my 80 gig hard drive which is about 4 years old.
I'm leaning mostly towards my video card with all the recent display issues and system freezes can be due to video cards.
Everything else in my system has been purchased less than 3 months ago this didn't start happening until a couple weeks ago. Multiple reinstalls of windows hasn't fixed it for 2 different 80gig drives I swapped. Strange that both SEEM to click when I reboot from freezes. But to me most of this points towards the video card with a few symptoms that seem out of character.

You made no mention of your system specs. Bumping up your RAM voltage to Mfg. specs should take care of the system freezing symptoms.

 

[thebratprince001]

No I hadn't tried resetting the bios... I might want to check the battery too because on a few reboots after a freeze it changed the boot order of the hard disks but I didn't notice any other changes.
The PSU is JustPC which came with the case and has performed well over the years but normally I would have bought another case before now. I just have problems believing it's the hard drive when 2 of them are doing it at the exact same time and they aren't both in my system concurrently. Then there's the video driver notification I got from windows and the signal to my monitor coming and going abruptly when I run Office 2007 for more than a few minutes.
Also no Over clocking. I stopped doing that once I started using the AMD 64 series a year ago.
Oh one clue might also be that I had to replace my previous motherboard after a year without warning. I tested a new PSU (which works fine in my son's system) and my board wouldn't boot anymore so i had to replace it and in the process, ram and cpu just to upgrade at that point. Would that point to a possible PSU issue?

 

[thebratprince001]

Sorry I thought it would list my specs since I had to list them when I signed up... lame

JustPC 450w-12v PSU
Biostar k8m800 Micro AM2 Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64, 2400 MHz (12 x 200) 3800+ New Orleans
Kingston 1024 MB (DDR2-667 DDR2 SDRAM) (single chip)
Nvidia Geforce FX 5500 256mb AGP

External HD's Maxtor 300gb, 200 gb
Internal HD's IDE Maxtor 80gb, 320gb

Integrated sound and lan

 

[badge]

If your MB BIOS has adjustments for RAM voltage, bump the voltage up a notch or two or set it to RAM Mfg. specs.

 

[thebratprince001]

well the ram is running at 1.88 and it's set in the bios for 1.95 so is increasing it something to consider? there really aren't that many adjustments i can make to timings and such as there was on my old board. i reset the bios so i guess it's a wait and see thing at this point. I'm just worried about buying a piece of hardware and that not solving the problems. I suppose if I'm going to start somewhere it should be the hard drive just to see if that fixes the booting problems. but i don't see how a drive failing would affect the signal from the video card to the monitor.. puzzling.

 

[rgeist554]

Well, if your OS isn't running, then there isn't much to display. Also - There's the fact that you said you can't move your mouse while it's freezing, so I'm inclined to believe that it's not video related (at least, not completely) There could be a bad sector on your HD or something.

**Side note: Have you ever ran a virus scan, adaware, or CCleaner?

 

[thebratprince001]

yeah the virus scan came up clean and this happens repeatedly after new installs of windows so i don't think it's adware.

 

[thebratprince001]

as an update to anyone else that experiences this it was a combination of failing hard disk and video card.
no sooner than i installed windows on the new drive did it begin locking up on the welcome screen or rebooting.
yes despite popular belief a video card can cause both. but instead of doing it after a while it was doing it immediately upon loading windows.