How to diagnose a repeatable freeze?

[iansmith6]

My Windows 7 desktop locks up randomly but recently has been doing it when trying to run a few applications. Skype and Sims 2 both cause it to simply lock up and require a power cycle to recover.

Since I can cause the lockup at will, is there any way to diagnose this? Remote debugger? Anything at all? Has to be some tool I can use to spit out debug info somewhere. Thanks.

I've done the standard memtest and other diag utilities, nothing shows up.

 

[Darkbreeze]

If you can find your minidump files somebody here can probably help you out. http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/1084-63-where-find-mini-files-windows

 

[iansmith6]

If you can find your minidump files somebody here can probably help you out. http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/1084-63-where-find-mini-files-windows

There are no minidump files or system event logs. The computer just freezes up. No mouse, no response to caps-lock. Hard drive light goes out. It's like the whole thing just locks up. No black or blue screen, the video just freezes.

Annoying as I can repeat it whenever I want but there doesn't seem to be any way of finding out just what causes it.

Some sort of remote debugger I can attach to a process and send out live stack traces or something maybe?

 

[Darkbreeze]

What's everything look like on your hardware specs. Can you go into the BIOS and made sure all your voltages, temperatures and settings look ok? Maybe get HWinfo and post an image of the sensors? (Credit to i7baby on using that for diagnosis.) Since it freezes with no dump file and power is lost to components I'm thinking it's probably more of a hardware issue. If it was software related there should be time for an error log due to a bad call or something.