Metropol

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

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.

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.

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.

Seems to run fine. But it's not a case of going slow, it's a case of completely locking up with no response from anything without hard resetting.

At work we have XP machines running on 256MB of ram.

They're a treat.

Luckily my one is 1GB so it's usable.

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.

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.

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.

I get exactly this with my lappy, very occasionally.

>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.

Don't worry all, everything's sorted. Many thanks!

TopCat wrote:Don't worry all, everything's sorted. Many thanks!

What was the problem? How did you fix it? We're all dying to know!