I have been having this problem for a few weeks now and I have seen others with similar problems but I have never seen a resolution. My system freezes (no mouse, no keyboard, no disk access nothing) it used to do it only at idle, lately it has been doing when I am in program and it really doesn't matter what program - it is very random. It does seem that when I am in a program and it locks up, it is usually when I am not inputting any thing, just staring at the screen! When it started doing this, I had not made any changes that I can think of (I actually make very few changes to the system.) I leave the computer on 99.9% of the time and have done so for years - no problem. One day it just started freezing up in the middle of the night. It will freeze up when I am in the safe mode, while it is sitting at the CTRL-ALT-DEL log in prompt and most any other time. There are only two scenarios that it hasn't locked up in. The first is if I go to my bios setting screen - I left it sit there for two days and it never froze. the second is if I hit F8 while booting windows and leave it for days without making a boot choice. These are the only two places where it will sit without locking up. This kind of tells me that it is not a hardware problem but rather a Window problem - cause if it was a hardware problem I would think it would freeze in at least one of these situations. My machine is an older PIII 600 512k ram 2 hard drives (10 and 8 gig) I have brought the machine down to bare minimum - removed everything except video card and hard drives - no modem, no networking, no sound card... I only load the bare minimums at boot, get no errors in event viewer, and I have updated all drivers to current including bios. I really don't want to reinstall the operating system, mostly because From what I have seen on the net with others that have the problem, it didn't do any good! I was running SP3 when it happened but I did upgrade to SP4 - no help! I have scanned the disks with every thing from chkdsk to every virus and spyware program I could find and nothing. I done the SFC.exe and nothing, Created a new user and still same thing. At idle my CPU runs at about 3-4% and the only thing running to speak of is the system idle process. I have a temperature sensing mother board and software that shows me what the CPU and Motherboard temp are at all time an no problems there. I have cleaned the 'innards' of the machine out and it wasn't all that dirty (I clean it out every now and then) I'm at my wits end - has anybody had this problem and solved it or any idea of what programs run at idle that may be doing this. Any help will be greatly appreciated
Windows XP Win2k Freezes
- Thread starter Jaybird
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- Jan 17, 2007
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boot to safe mode with f8 and uninstall any extra software you don't use/need then do a system cleanup by using run -> cleanmgr. After clleanmgr do a defrag, hopefully this helps!
I tried it...
I ran Cleanmgr as instructed - but I have already spent lots of time and effort cleaning out all the junk! - the only thing it came up with was the recycle bin - everything else was clean. It did however suggest getting rid of windows programs that weren't being used - window server IIS ( I think that's what it was) so I did.
As of this time it hasn't frozen up again BUT, I run a program called memtest when the computer is idle (especially at night cause I am on it most of the day and even though it does freeze sometimes when I am working, it is rare). So memtest stops it from freezing which kind of tells me that it is not a memory problem. I have also run a program called speedfan which if you enable logging it writes to the hard drive every 3 seconds. At first it didn't freeze when this ws running but then it started to whether it was running or not - and memtest doesn't write to the hard drive - so I dont think it's a hard drive problem (the drives have come up clean when tested using other software any way). The only other thing I have done is installed Diskeeper to defrag my drives (I used the windows defrag before but diskeeper does a much better job). I am kind of afraid to turn off memtest since it does stop it from Freezing but maybe I will tonight just to see if the problem was cured! - I'll let you know.
I ran Cleanmgr as instructed - but I have already spent lots of time and effort cleaning out all the junk! - the only thing it came up with was the recycle bin - everything else was clean. It did however suggest getting rid of windows programs that weren't being used - window server IIS ( I think that's what it was) so I did.
As of this time it hasn't frozen up again BUT, I run a program called memtest when the computer is idle (especially at night cause I am on it most of the day and even though it does freeze sometimes when I am working, it is rare). So memtest stops it from freezing which kind of tells me that it is not a memory problem. I have also run a program called speedfan which if you enable logging it writes to the hard drive every 3 seconds. At first it didn't freeze when this ws running but then it started to whether it was running or not - and memtest doesn't write to the hard drive - so I dont think it's a hard drive problem (the drives have come up clean when tested using other software any way). The only other thing I have done is installed Diskeeper to defrag my drives (I used the windows defrag before but diskeeper does a much better job). I am kind of afraid to turn off memtest since it does stop it from Freezing but maybe I will tonight just to see if the problem was cured! - I'll let you know.
Didn't Help
I turned off memtest last night and the system froze within a half hour! Someone suggested it might be the mother board but I kind of doubt it since I can work on the computer for hours (8-10) using all kinds of programs and it doesn't Freeze. I would think that if the mobo was bad it wouldn't let me work that long and my only experience with a mobo failure was when a machine wouldn't boot!. Others suggested the power supply but SpeedFan watches all the voltages in the system also and the log says nothing out of the normal - all voltages are within specs. I am leaning toward a virus but I have scanned it with 4 different scanners including ZA ( a deep scan), wak it (I think that was it), and two other free scans and non of them came up with anything except a few cookies! There are a lot of posts about a "Ransom" virus that had similar characteristics but I checked for that and it's not there! Any other suggestions?
I turned off memtest last night and the system froze within a half hour! Someone suggested it might be the mother board but I kind of doubt it since I can work on the computer for hours (8-10) using all kinds of programs and it doesn't Freeze. I would think that if the mobo was bad it wouldn't let me work that long and my only experience with a mobo failure was when a machine wouldn't boot!. Others suggested the power supply but SpeedFan watches all the voltages in the system also and the log says nothing out of the normal - all voltages are within specs. I am leaning toward a virus but I have scanned it with 4 different scanners including ZA ( a deep scan), wak it (I think that was it), and two other free scans and non of them came up with anything except a few cookies! There are a lot of posts about a "Ransom" virus that had similar characteristics but I checked for that and it's not there! Any other suggestions?
Seems to be fixed!
My system seem to be stable! hasn't froze in 2 days so far. here is what I think fixed it. Even though my bios was up to date (I flashed to to the current bios years ago when the latest and last update came out) there was another update for the motherboard newer than the one bios update and that was the driver files for the motherboard. Even though the most recent bios was dated 2003 the driver update was dated 2005! So I updated the driver for the mother board without updating the bios since the current bios was the same. Then I was getting a system event saying that there was a Perf_lib error and related back to PCAnwhere. Now I have PCAnywhere on my computer and it did work OK but it did not load at start up. The only thing I can think of is that there was somewhere in the bootup a driver was loaded for something that it uses and that caused the problem. so I uninstalled PCAnywhere and no problems since. I think the real problem was the motherboard drivers (not the bios. Hope this helps somebody!
My system seem to be stable! hasn't froze in 2 days so far. here is what I think fixed it. Even though my bios was up to date (I flashed to to the current bios years ago when the latest and last update came out) there was another update for the motherboard newer than the one bios update and that was the driver files for the motherboard. Even though the most recent bios was dated 2003 the driver update was dated 2005! So I updated the driver for the mother board without updating the bios since the current bios was the same. Then I was getting a system event saying that there was a Perf_lib error and related back to PCAnwhere. Now I have PCAnywhere on my computer and it did work OK but it did not load at start up. The only thing I can think of is that there was somewhere in the bootup a driver was loaded for something that it uses and that caused the problem. so I uninstalled PCAnywhere and no problems since. I think the real problem was the motherboard drivers (not the bios. Hope this helps somebody!