Help debug system hangup w/ Windows XP Pro + SP2

[polaris8030]

Hi all .. I recently did a fresh install of Windows XP Pro on my
desktop. This time I also installed SP2 right after install. Until then
I had XP Pro with SP1.

I noticed that my PC would hang .. sometimes 30 mins from power-up,
sometimes after 10-12 hours. Ctrl-Alt-Del does not work so I had to
power cycle every time.

Now my PC is also not the latest and greatest, so my first thought was
that the mobo or the PCI cards were going out. So I tested memory
(memtest), took out all PCI cards except for the graphics card, all ATA
drives except for the boot drive ... still the system hangs.

Some of the posters have suggested that older processors or older BIOS
's have problems with SP2. That could certainly be my case.

I would like to hear from the experts in this group on what I should
try next. There is no information captured by Windows as to why the PC
hangs ... here I refer to the "Event Viewer" which does not capture
anything of interest. I do see an "acpi error upon boot up, but I think
I have always seen that.

If I run out of ideas to try, I plan to do a fresh install of Windows
XP w/ SP1 and see if at least I can get back to my previous running
condition.

TIA

PC basics
1 GHz Athlon
IWill KK266 mobo
1 GB Corsair SDRAM

 

[polaris8030]

An update ....

the error msg I see in my Event Viewer is this ...

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.

given that this is related to ACPI ... and there is no BIOS upgrade
available, I have turned off hibernation and all disks, monitor etc.
are not turned off .. not sure if this helps, but so far 10 hrs have
passed and the system hasn''t frozen.

-S