Where to look next?

[Jim]

I'm assisting a friend troubleshoot her computer. At random intervals
the browser simply quits. By that I mean shuts off completely, not just
freezing. This happens with any of the installed browsers.

Memtest produced no errors.

Hard drive diagnostic came up clean.

Swapped in a different hard drive and it too drops the browser.

Where would you look next?

 

[Jan Alter]

I'm assisting a friend troubleshoot her computer. At random intervals
the browser simply quits. By that I mean shuts off completely, not just
freezing. This happens with any of the installed browsers.

Memtest produced no errors.

Hard drive diagnostic came up clean.

Swapped in a different hard drive and it too drops the browser.

Where would you look next?

Hi,
I'm assuming when you say you dropped in another hard drive you did a
complete install of the OS and the problem continues to happen. I would
consider that the network card may be going unless you happened to install
all the updates and nothing unusual occured while that took place. Conisder
first looking for a newer driver for the NIC and then if that doesn't pan
out try a different card in a PCI slot.

 

[Dave]

I'm assisting a friend troubleshoot her computer. At random intervals
the browser simply quits. By that I mean shuts off completely, not just
freezing. This happens with any of the installed browsers.

Memtest produced no errors.

Hard drive diagnostic came up clean.

Swapped in a different hard drive and it too drops the browser.

Where would you look next?

If you copied the old hard drive to the new hard drive (rather than
reinstalling everything), your next step should be a thorough virus scan of
all files. -Dave

 

[Jim]

Hi,
I'm assuming when you say you dropped in another hard drive you did a
complete install of the OS and the problem continues to happen. I would
consider that the network card may be going unless you happened to
install all the updates and nothing unusual occured while that took
place. Conisder first looking for a newer driver for the NIC and then if
that doesn't pan out try a different card in a PCI slot.

Yes that was a fresh install. Why would the lack of a network signal
cause the entire application to shut down? I'd think that just the
screens wouldn't update and perhaps a message would appear that the URL
couldn't be reached.

 

[Marty]

I'm assuming when you say you dropped in another hard drive you did a
complete install of the OS and the problem continues to happen. I would
consider that the network card may be going unless you happened to
install all the updates and nothing unusual occured while that took
place. Conisder first looking for a newer driver for the NIC and then if
that doesn't pan out try a different card in a PCI slot.

A NIC failure will result in failed connection but it will *not* cause
that symptom. It is rather bogus advice to suggest changing NIC, swapping
PCI slots etc.

Generally, when applications quit without any error message it is due to
a multi-threading problem in the application itself or a plugin/COM
process within the application failing.

What browser is it? Does the fault occur only all webpages or does it
occur on a specific site?