XP Pro Freezes

[Guest]

Running XP Pro on Dell 8200. With no pattern, anytime from shortly after
startup to within 20 minutes, everything freezes. Cntrl+Alt+Del will not
bring up task magr, nor will "enter" or mouse movement, the machine is
locked. Only killing power at the surge protector will turn off main power.
I have checked the obvious, fan is working and dust bunnies are cleaned out
virus scan detects nothing. It has been suggested I may need to upgrade the
BIOS after SP1 and SP2, but I added the SP's over a month ago and the machine
was running fine, this problem just started a couple of days ago. Any help
would be appreciated.

 

[Rich Barry]

Jim, how's the temp of the CPU? Fan running smoothly and clear of dust?
I just had to remove my Heatsink Fan and give it
a good cleaning and replace the Thermal paste on the CPU. Temps had gone
up about twenty degrees. Fine now.

 

[Guest]

Did not measure exact temp, not sure what it should be anyway, but I did
clean the fan, in fact the entire case inside. Problem still persists, and I
really do not want to reformat the drive and reinstall all the software,
although I have several recommendations to do that. The machine is 3 years
old and the consensus seems to be that a lot of junk has piled up in that
time, eventhough I am religious about running Norton, AdAware, SpyBot, disk
clean and defrag every Sat morning. I did turn off Norton and XP firewall to
see if that may have been conflicting, still froze. Virus scans are
negative, but the machine has seemed to slow a bit since I installed SP1 and
SP2.

 

[jdksue]

Did not measure exact temp, not sure what it should be anyway, but I did
clean the fan, in fact the entire case inside. Problem still persists, and I
really do not want to reformat the drive and reinstall all the software,
although I have several recommendations to do that. The machine is 3 years
old and the consensus seems to be that a lot of junk has piled up in that
time, eventhough I am religious about running Norton, AdAware, SpyBot, disk
clean and defrag every Sat morning. I did turn off Norton and XP firewall to
see if that may have been conflicting, still froze. Virus scans are
negative, but the machine has seemed to slow a bit since I installed SP1 and
SP2.

:

That looks like a hardware problem. Could be anything really but I
agree with Rich Barry, check high temperatures first. My P4 2.4 has been
running (a little warmer than I would like) around 42C for a couple of
years. Google for SisSoftware Sandra to check it out. Next suspects are
power supply, hard drive(s) and memory stick(s) in that order. The power
supply is a tougher nut to check but the rest can be done by downloading
free apps. and checking connections.

John