Windows Locks Up

[Karl]

For some reason, my windows XP Professional started
locking up after about 40 minutes. It happens whether I
am active on the computer or if it is idle. Have palyed
around with the Power Settings but to no avail. Clock
stops and the keyboard/mouse are unresponsive. The hard
drive light stays on continuously. I have to do a hard
reboot and then things are fine for about 40 minutes. Any
suggestions on how to correct this problem?

 

[Jone Doe]

2 things come to mind. 1. virus? 2. If it is happening after about 40
minutes consistently, perhaps overheating is a factor. Have you pulled the
case and made sure the fans are working? There may be multiple fans, check
the power supply, motherboard and case.

 

[gwtx2]

I just had this problem. I have two drives in my system. After a few
minutes of activity or inactivity, the PC would freeze and the hard
drive light would stay on. I disconnected one of the drives (non OS)
and the problem went away. I store my paginf file, Mozilla Internet
cache, web accelerator cache, and Java cache on this drive along with
lots of other files and backups off the main drive. I reconnected the
drive and cleared all the caches. I had to disable Virtual Memory in
order to delete the pagefile.sys, reboot, and enable again. Problem
solved.

I suspect the problem was a corrupted pagefile.sys since all the other
caches are Internet related and the problem occured if I was surfing or
not, but who knows.