Freezing Computer

  • Thread starter Thread starter David A Gourlay
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David A Gourlay

My computer is 18 months old. Pentum 3, 1GHz, 384Mb RAM, 2 hard disks 20Gb
and 80Gb, NVIDEA RIVA TNT2 Model64/Model64 Pro graphics card, National
Semi-conductor DP83815 Fast Ethernet network card, running Windows XP Home.

Since around the time, 6 months ago, when I put in the second hard disk and
some of the memory, the computer has been regularly freezing. The only way
out is to press the reset button, resulting in data loss and extreme
frustration when in the middle of a game! The freezes occur during start-up
(at the log-on screen when putting in my password), during games (eg MS
Flight Sim) and even MS Office programmes.

The computer vendor doesn't want to get involved, as it is out of guarantee,
but suggested it could be a fault in either the graphics card or one of the
3 memory cards - if the computer tries to write there, it can't, and stops.

I'm not totally familar with the workings of computers, so any advice on
this would be welcome. If buying another graphics card, for example, would
help, I'll do it - but there's no point if that's not the problem.

In Event Viewer, the following message appears usually at the time the
freeze occurs:

AMLI: ACPI BIOS is attempting to read from an illegal IO port address
(0xcfc), which lies in the 0xcf8 - 0xcff protected address range. This could
lead to system instability. Please contact your system vendor for technical
assistance.
 
from the wonderful said:
My computer is 18 months old. Pentum 3, 1GHz, 384Mb RAM, 2 hard disks 20Gb
and 80Gb, NVIDEA RIVA TNT2 Model64/Model64 Pro graphics card, National
Semi-conductor DP83815 Fast Ethernet network card, running Windows XP Home.

Since around the time, 6 months ago, when I put in the second hard disk and
some of the memory, the computer has been regularly freezing. The only way
out is to press the reset button, resulting in data loss and extreme
frustration when in the middle of a game! The freezes occur during start-up
(at the log-on screen when putting in my password), during games (eg MS
Flight Sim) and even MS Office programmes.

The computer vendor doesn't want to get involved, as it is out of guarantee,
but suggested it could be a fault in either the graphics card or one of the
3 memory cards - if the computer tries to write there, it can't, and stops.

I'm not totally familar with the workings of computers, so any advice on
this would be welcome. If buying another graphics card, for example, would
help, I'll do it - but there's no point if that's not the problem.

In Event Viewer, the following message appears usually at the time the
freeze occurs:

AMLI: ACPI BIOS is attempting to read from an illegal IO port address
(0xcfc), which lies in the 0xcf8 - 0xcff protected address range. This could
lead to system instability. Please contact your system vendor for technical
assistance.
Click to expand...

Sounds like you may need a BIOS update .. I think if you stick this
phrase into www.google.com you will get more than a few hits, with
suggestions (if not, use the 'groups' tab). However that should not have
started just because you added memory/disk, that would have been a
problem before then.

If you want to verify your memory isn't the problem, run
www.memtest86.com, overnight. You need to set your BIOS to boot from a
floppy, since that's what memtest86 runs from (Windows/DOS not
involved).
 
GSV Three Minds in a Can said:
Sounds like you may need a BIOS update .. I think if you stick this
phrase into www.google.com you will get more than a few hits, with
suggestions (if not, use the 'groups' tab). However that should not have
started just because you added memory/disk, that would have been a
problem before then.

If you want to verify your memory isn't the problem, run
www.memtest86.com, overnight. You need to set your BIOS to boot from a
floppy, since that's what memtest86 runs from (Windows/DOS not
involved).
Click to expand...


Thanks. I'm going try this tonight - I'll post tomorrow and let you know the
result.
 
from the wonderful said:
OK, I left the programme running all night, and it reported NO errors. Looks
like the memory cards are OK.

Are there programmes like that one that can test other components of the
computer? My suspicions still lie with the graphics card - is there way of
testing that?
Click to expand...

You could try the tests in 'dxdiag' although they are hardly
comprehensive. However you didn't change the graphics card, so I don't
see why that would cause a 'recent' fault.

Do you happen to know what motherboard/chipset the machine has .. some
of the earlier VIA chipsets had severe problems when two (or more) DMA
channels were in use at once ... copying from one disk to another, with
a large (several MB) file would result in 8 bytes arriving as 'zero'
when they left as something else .. this can be rather terminal.
Creative SBLive cards were a contributing factor - do you have one of
those?

Another possibility is PSU problem - although most PSUs should have
enough 'headroom' for an extra disk and more memory, (especially since
nothing in your system is particularly 'thirsty') unless the vendor was
really cutting corners

You could try disconnecting the second disk that you added and seeing if
that fixes the problem. Or you could try an updated video card driver
(if one is available). Else I'm afraid it comes back to 'disconnect
everything that you don't absolutely need' (NIC, sound card, second
disk, etc etc) and seeing if it stops the problem - then add things back
until the problem comes back.
 
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