Processor causing freezes?

[madmanbmw]

I have been working on a PC this afternoon for a friend whom complains of constant freezes. While just "exploring" this machine it locked up on me twice. It did not make any sound or give an error messages, it just simply haulted. The system is an AMD K6 450mhz with 128mb ram and a 10gig hd running win98. It is about 13 months old. I downloaded Sandra, the benchmarking system information program to grab so info. I ran the CPU, DISK, and 3D NOw benchmarks without fail. However the 5 times I tried to run the memory benchmark (which includes CPU, CHIPSET, CACHE, MEMORY)the system locked up on me everytime. The PC was running at 50.5C or 122.9F which seems a little warm but I did not know if this would effect it. The main board is a Pronix (Expox) 06/08/1999 Apollo MVP3 AGP/PCI set. If anyone has any ideas as what could be causing these lockups please help.

Thanks
madison
mmcmajor@apex.net

 

[ledzepp98]

flakey memory? has he been messing around in the bios without telling you? has he tried updating drivers or doing any "performance tweaks" and possibly stumbled on a bad setting?

 

[Guest]

Other possible steps to take are disabling cache in bios (if option) - it'll run like a dog after that but if it passes test cache might be flaky. Other things, if more than one stick of ram, pull one and try mem test. I would lean towards physical problem with memory or cpu.. though bios problems could cause it. Set it to defaults too. None of those are in any particular order, just brainstorming some ideas to try out.

"The answer is not in your hair."
"I'd rather jump in the lava than be fragged by you."

 

[madmanbmw]

The computer that I am working on belongs to a 40 year old woman and I know that she is not too woried about perfomance tweak and I doubt she has ever heard of the term BIOS. Once again the system is a little over a year old and only 700megs are taken up on the hardrive. Email and word processing are its main functions. I doubt anything has been changed on it sense I took it out of the box.

Ok, try turning off cache, pull memory one dimm at a time. Anything else? Could this simply be a windows problem. What are the odds this is hardware?

Thanks
madison

 

[Guest]

Hard to say. Memory problems can mimick windows problems and vice versa. I usually would say reload windows prior to replacing anything you're depending upon using windows as part of the test. Don't have to format, can use another disk with a good load or just move windows, install a copy to directory old one was at and if it doesn't work, deltree the new windows and move old one back in place. Now, that does assume you can move around in dos fairly competently, otherwise I wouldn't recommend that course of moving windows.

"The answer is not in your hair."
"I'd rather jump in the lava than be fragged by you."

 

[madmanbmw]

hmm... I have a hard drive with a fresh copy of 98 second addition. Coulnt I just hook that up and run the test again. Instead of moving windows around. Reformating would not be that big of a deal. Only 700megs occupied counting windows.

 

[Bubba]

Check in the device manager to make sure no components are sharing IRQs.
Just a thought.