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Computer Freezing

Last response: in Motherboards
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I am working on someone's computer that is having some very odd problems that I can't see mto track down... The owners complaint was that it kept on freezing. I looked at it and it had severe rootkit infections and bad sectors on the hard drive. We replaced the drive and did a fresh install of Windows. I also ran memcheck from dos for a few hours and it did not find any errors. They got the computer back last night after I could not find any other infections. I heard from them again this morning that it froze when they were checking emails from Outlook. Any ideas on what it could be?

More about : computer freezing

Motherboard Master

Double check the video drivers. That rig has a puny 300w PSU and is an older one at that. Try swapping in another PSU to see if that solves the problem. Any standard PSU should work.

Could also be bad capacitors on the mobo. Worth looking inside with a flashlight for any bulging/leaking capacitors.
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Have you ever seen leaking capacitors where the electrolytic fluid was black and looked more like a mark from a black Sharpie? There are some caps that have that on the motherboard and I am pretty certain that I was the first person to crack open this system so either the fluid was charred or, for some reason, HP marked some of the caps.

I noticed that the HDD light was still blinking after a freeze so I tried swapping the graphics card and everything is working now. It appears that it may have just been the GPU freezing while the rest of the computer was okay. Since a hard drive and graphics card went out at the same time I am also switching to a new PSU because I am afraid this one is producing dirty power and trashing components.
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