XP Freezes System

[Guest]

Hi!

I am a fairly sophisticated computer user, but this problem has got me
completely stumped. Any and all help would be appreciated. One of my
computer systems has started "locking up" at random intervals. I will be
going along and the mouse will freeze. No warning, no error message, no
nothing --- just a dead stop. I am forced to "close down" by shutting power
to the system. When I reboot, XP acts like nothing happened (eg, scandisk is
not run as would be normal with an improper shutdown). I thought the
"problem" was caused by a bad software installation.

I decided to wipe the HD and do a clean XP install. I had trouble
reinstalling XP -- it kept "stalling" around 23 minutes remaining. I finally
succeeded, but the system is still locking up (eg, I tried to install SP1
but cannot complete the update because the system locks up). I have tried
everything I can think of (tore the system down completely, checked to make
sure the M/B was not shorting to the tray, reseated the CPU, reseated the
memory, rechecked all the cable connections, changed out the power supply,
replaced the CMOS battery, checked the BIOS settings, checked that all fans
are functioning properly, including the CPU fan, etc.) I thought maybe the
on-board SCSI controller was bad, so I installed a separate SCSI card. The
problem remained. I (painfully) installed XP on an IDE drive thinking that
the problem would go away, but it didn't. I thought maybe the HD was running
too hot, so I installed a cooling unit. No help. (It takes about 3 hours to
low level format the SCSI drive. I have done this several times without any
problem. This drive does get hot, but it has not locked up during
formatting.)

At this point, the system consists of the following (I removed all
non-essential equipment):

SuperMicro PIIIDR3 M/B (contains onboard Adaptec 29160 SCSI adapter) -
latest BIOS installed
Intel PIII 933MHz Slot 1 CPU (Boxed Retail Unit)
1GB (4 X 256MB RDRAM) PC800 Rambus ECC memory
WD 6.4GB IDE Drive
Seagate ST19171WC 9GB SCSI Drive
Matrox G450 Video Card (Retail)
SB Live! 5.1 Platinium Sound Card
Yamaha 2200E CD-RW Drive (IDE)

Hopefully, someone can point me in the right direction to correct whatever
the problem is. Thanks in advance for your thoughts/suggestions.

Warmest Regards,
Ric Schecter

 

[Alex Nichol]

I am a fairly sophisticated computer user, but this problem has got me
completely stumped. Any and all help would be appreciated. One of my
computer systems has started "locking up" at random intervals. I will be
going along and the mouse will freeze. No warning, no error message, no
nothing --- just a dead stop.

Such freezes are quite often a result of the mouse driver and the video
driver arguing over which controls the pointer. It is easy to check on
- Control Panel - Display - Settings, Click Advanced, and on the
Troubleshoot page reduce the acceleration slider one notch or two. If
one does it, there is negligible loss of performance: if two are needed
look for updated video drivers from the maker's site.

 

[Alex Nichol]

Next morning, I place the remaining two (2) sticks of memory in the system
(for a total of 1GB) and run MemTest86 from a boot disk. Six hours later
(after repeated cycles), no errors are recorded. I boot into XP (with 1GB
RAM in system) and try to run MemTest. It runs one (1) cycle and returns an
error, then runs another cycle and returns another error, and then the
system reboots. (Does MemTest have a problem testing 1GB of RAM??) I
remove two (2) sticks of memory (and replace with "dummies") and reboot.
Now I get a read error on the disk. After a full shutdown for about 30
minutes, I restart the system and this time I get a "missing ntoskrnl.exe"
error message.

There are know to be some motherboard/chipsets that have difficulty with
multiple sticks in producing consistency of performance - and Windows is
very fussy about consistency

But I don't follow your

" I boot into XP (with 1GB RAM in system) and try to run MemTest. "

The readme for Memtest that I have says very explicitly that it has to
be run from its boot disk and will not run under windows. ANd that
would include not running in XP's DOS emulation, if that is what you
tried.

I think you need to follow this up with some people more expert in
hardware - try the microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware group, or one of
the ones in
comp.sys.ibm.hardware