Lock ups -- why?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jack
  • Start date Start date
J

Jack

This question has been delayed as long as possible but I am at my wits end.

Would y'all give me some solid reasons my system would lock up? It is
running Windows XP Professional with plenty of RAM and disk space.

When I say "lock up", I mean everything freezes during a program operation
(doesn't seem to make any difference which program) and the only way to get
is started again is to power down and re-boot.

On rare occassions, it might power down before the freeze and then try to
re-boot but freeze during the re-boot at about the point of the Windows XP
screen which has the running blue dashes.

All of my drivers appear to be "working".

The Events Viewer, process, security or system, doesn't show any error at
the time of the lock-up.

I am not claiming it to be an operating system error, whether it is nor not.
 
If you have any USB devices connected, disconnect them, reboot and see if
the problem still occurs.

Jason

******************************************************
 
-----Original Message-----
This question has been delayed as long as possible but I am at my wits end.

Would y'all give me some solid reasons my system would lock up? It is
running Windows XP Professional with plenty of RAM and disk space.

When I say "lock up", I mean everything freezes during a program operation
(doesn't seem to make any difference which program) and the only way to get
is started again is to power down and re-boot.

On rare occassions, it might power down before the freeze and then try to
re-boot but freeze during the re-boot at about the point of the Windows XP
screen which has the running blue dashes.

All of my drivers appear to be "working".

The Events Viewer, process, security or system, doesn't show any error at
the time of the lock-up.

I am not claiming it to be an operating system error, whether it is nor not.


.
Click to expand...
Hello
Run this free virus scan and free spysweeper and delete
any and all virus and spy programs,(they are free
downloads)
sounds like a virus issue
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
http://www.spysweeper.com/
Click to expand...
Hope this helps
Jim
 
Lock-ups are usually (95%) hardware related,even if event viewer doesnt
show anything.They can be tough to isolate but adding a new hd eliminates
50% fairly inexpensivly,if it persists,youre looking at a board failure,being that
all cables,connections,etc. are in good shape.
 
Jason, Jim and Andrew, thanks to all of you.

Scans have been fine and I use AdWare.

My fear is and has been what Andrew has suggested. My guess is that it is
the hard drive as, when the computer freezes, the pitch of the sound of the
fan/hard drive lowers as if it is labouring a bit.

Also, this did not start until about three weeks ago.
 
Whoops,

I failed to mention that, in Safe Mode, it has gone over 12 hours without a
freeze.

As a point of reference, it has locked up six times in the past 8 hourse
under normal boot. This would indicate a driver but none show to be
failing.
 
Have you tried updating your display drivers???

I was having the exact same problem and fixed it by updating display
drivers.
 
You may try to isolating what process is causing the
freeze by successively disabling each service or process
until you are freeze free. I diagnosed a similar problem
in the past, but not in XP. I believe in XP you go to
Start>Run> and type in msconfig. After the window comes up
you choose which service or process to disable during boot
up. Keep going down the line, disabling one or two
processes at a time, rebooting each time, until it does
not freeze. This will at least narrow what driver or dll
is responsible.

Perhaps someone with more XP experience can fine-tune this
procedure for you.
 
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