PC Freezing, help!

[kingduh]

Hi everyone, my PC has started freezing/crashing lateley and I'm trying to figure out the problem. Here's

what happened prior to this problem if anyone can lend some insights.

prior to this starting I had tried to see if a troubled external HD would work if connected direct. I

removed from housing and hooked it up to my PC motherboard but rested it on its side on the casing floor,

not installed on the rack like normal since I was just testing it. Not sure if thats a no no. When I

powered up i noticed a faint whif of burn smell. Not sure what that was, the drive didn't work as I kinda

expected anyway but the PC seemed fine at that point. I shutdown, removed drive and then decided there was

alot of dust in there so I compressed air blew a bunch of dust out and about the case and components.

restarted and then I ran a program and it locked up. I restart load a IE, locks up. Now it seems to keep

locking up. Do you think this had to do with the harddrive install or the cleaning? and what was that

burning smell?? could that of been the bad drive getting worse or could laying the drive on the caseing

floor like that cause an electrical problem, short, blown fuse, etc in my motherboard or components. Any

thoughts, help! thanks

 

[macusn]

You could have shorted something out or blew some dust somewhere it should not be. Maybe some dust in a open Ram slot??

Please post all of your hardware.

If you have a different SATA controller try plugging the HD in to it and see if it works.

 

[clutchc]

It may be totally unrelated to your HDD testing. Have you cleaned your system of resource wasting crap and registry errors lately? If not, run CCleaner and do the Clean and Registry both. You may have to run it more than once untill it comes back clean.
http://www.piriform.com/CCLEANER