XP lock ups

[stefan]

hi. i just built my brother a computer. i'm more of an
amateur at this. i've built one of mine and one for my
girlfriend without a hitch before this. my brother's
computer boots up fine. it loads windows fine. the
problem is that it happens to lock up once in awhile. so
far it has done it twice while playing games "halo"
and "morrowind", once when installing a game, and once
when browsing the web. i'm curious as to what might be
the casue of these lockups? RAM? Motherboard? Videocard?
Windows XP? i'm totally lost. Here is his basic setup.
Radeon 9800 pro, pentium 3.0 w/hyperthreading, 512 3200
RAM. i'd really appreciate any responses or
suggestions. thanks.

 

[Rich Barry]

Stefan, sounds like a great system. What's the power supply wattage
rating? I would back off on the Ram timings in the
Bios and maybe try a different Video Card driver. www.rage3d.com has
them.

 

[purplehaz]

Update video drivers if you can and make sure you have plenty of fans in the
computer. Power supply fan, two case fans, and processor fan and heatsink at
the minimum. Overheated components can cause random freeze ups. Make sure
your agp is running at full speed as well, a program like aida32 will tell
you. Also, what chipset is the motherboard using? Some older via chipsets
don't allow some ati cards to perform at anything higher than agp2x, but the
9800 and newer via chip sets should be fine.

 

[Guest]

well i'm pretty sure that the power supply is fine. i
have an antec true 430. I'm not sure if its the video
card driver because when i put my old radeon 9700 in the
computer it seemed to run fine. either way i used the
driver that came with the 9800 pro and the newest ones
from www.ati.com. a little update, i ran the most
extensive scandisk and i've been running the system fine
for about an hour. most of it searching the web and
maybe the last fifteem minutes playing halo full graphics
1280x1024 resolution. i'll post again if it died again.
thanks

 

[Guest]

well the internal temp is about 33 celcius at the highest
and the processor doesn't get hotter than 45. the i
don't think itsw the video card heating because it
doesn't run choppy before it freezes. in a game, it will
run very smoothly then freeze all of a sudden. i'll
check to make sure that my agp is running full speed.
thanks

 

[Alex Nichol]

i just built my brother a computer. i'm more of an
amateur at this. i've built one of mine and one for my
girlfriend without a hitch before this. my brother's
computer boots up fine. it loads windows fine. the
problem is that it happens to lock up once in awhile. so
far it has done it twice while playing games "halo"
and "morrowind", once when installing a game, and once
when browsing the web. i'm curious as to what might be
the casue of these lockups?

A fair bet is video drivers. May well be 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.