Recently we purchased some computer components for my Father's computer, as his last one had seemingly died. Whilst all this is well and good, once assembled we noticed some oddities.
The computer would randomly lock-up, usually during tasks such as installing and uninstalling, although sometimes it would just lock-up whilst idle.
Once locked-up, the computer would not respond at all, no input responses at all and a hard reset is required, usually this temporarily cures the problem until it happens again and needs another reset.
We thought it may be the power supply, however we're not too sure. Anyone any ideas?
Components:
Intel D101GGC Motherboard
Intel Pentium 4 Processor
1GB RAM
80GB Western Digital SATA HDD
Randomly Locking Up
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Dr Lobster*
- Posts: 2123
- Joined: Sat 30 Aug, 2003 20.14
We need to determine if you have a hardware or software problem.
Make sure you have got all the latest drivers and updates installed on your system.
Make sure that your computer has sufficient cooling and isn't overheating.
Random lockups like that can be a sign of faulty ram. You can download a boot CD image from http://www.memtest.org which you can use to run a test on your ram. Leave it going overnight.
Do a chkdsk c: /f /r to perform a full surface scan of your HDD. I don't think its disk related, but its worth ruling it out.
Make sure you have got all the latest drivers and updates installed on your system.
Make sure that your computer has sufficient cooling and isn't overheating.
Random lockups like that can be a sign of faulty ram. You can download a boot CD image from http://www.memtest.org which you can use to run a test on your ram. Leave it going overnight.
Do a chkdsk c: /f /r to perform a full surface scan of your HDD. I don't think its disk related, but its worth ruling it out.
Upload service: http://www.metropol247.co.uk/uploadservice
I know it's stating the obvious - but if you're running anything higher than Windows XP on hardware like that, it's not going to work smoothly - though I don't really think it would cause the machine to lock up completely.
Just to add another suggestion -If you are still on XP give the machine a defrag, if you have 7 it'll be doing it anyway. If you have Vista - get rid of it, 1GB Pentium 4 systems and Vista aren't a good mix.
Just to add another suggestion -If you are still on XP give the machine a defrag, if you have 7 it'll be doing it anyway. If you have Vista - get rid of it, 1GB Pentium 4 systems and Vista aren't a good mix.
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Nick Harvey
- God
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Probably not connected to locking up, but isn't 1Gb of RAM a bit borderline nowadays. I won't run an XP machine on less than 2Gb and my Windows 7 machine has 4Gb.
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bilky asko
- Posts: 1447
- Joined: Sat 08 Nov, 2008 19.48
I had this problem on my computer when I built it. It turned out the hard drive I'd bought wasn't working - replacing it worked a dream. (It was originally a Seagate, and I replaced it with a WD)
To check if its the hard drive, listen for unusual clicking.
To check if its the hard drive, listen for unusual clicking.
I get exactly this with my lappy, very occasionally.Sput wrote:Also, if it's the hard drive the LED will probably be stuck on when it crashes. This normally persists through a hard reset, if by hard reset you mean "Pressing the Reset Button" rather than turning it off and on.
>screen locks up, hourglass
>BSOD
>automatic reboot
>BIOS reports "Operating System not found"
>power off, back on, works fine
My lappy's done it for almost all of its life (2.5 years) and I never found it irritating enough to go through the faff of backing up everything and getting the Dell man out to replace it.
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bilky asko
- Posts: 1447
- Joined: Sat 08 Nov, 2008 19.48
What was the problem? How did you fix it? We're all dying to know!TopCat wrote:Don't worry all, everything's sorted. Many thanks!