Windows XP Pro sp1 freezing

[Eric]

I have Windows XP professional with SP1 installed. Occasionally, the
system will freeze and then unfreeze. This sometimes lasts for less
then a second and sometimes for more then 20. I can not tell if this
is because of a device causing many spurious interrupts or an
application gone awry.

Any idea what I can do to determine what application or device is
causing this?

Thanks!

 

[Jeff Rebeiro]

I would actually suspect Spyware or Adware running in the background. Do
you get popups? To see if its an application or device driver boot into
safe mode. If the system continues to lock up you could have bad memory,
processor, motherboard, hard drive, or video card. If all is well in Safe
Mode then it could be a device driver, application (including spyware), or
bad hardware other than the core components tested by booting in safe mode.

Try adaware www.lavasoftusa.com

If it does not resolve the problem then I would start pulling devices one by
one starting with external devices. If the problem happened after you
installed a particular device then I would start there.

Hope this helps,

Jeff Rebeiro

 

[Eric]

Jeff,

Thanks for the message. I regularly run Adaware and Spybot search and
Destroy so I am sure that is not the cause. (also, I do not get
popups.)

Let me tell you what type of solution I am hoping for and maybe
someone can recommend something. I would like some type of advanced
task manager which can monitor running processes and keep a log of the
last few minutes in order to see if one is behaving poorly. The
window task manager is great at telling you what is currently
happening but not (I think) at what just happened.

As for software, my motherboard has most things built in so removing
hardware is not an option. I have disabled several drivers in the
hardware manager but since the majority of devices share interrupts, a
poorly behaving device can cause another's driver to respond to every
spurious interrupt. Not sure how to determine if this is the problem
without an ICE.


-Eric