XP Pro freezes

[Tom Richards]

Quite suddenly, my normally very dependable desktop has started locking up
several times a day. No new apps have been installed recently. I started
noticing the machine not "waking up" after going into standby mode (monitor
off after 20 minutes and hard drive stopped after 1 hour). I would have to
press the power button and hold it down for awhile to shut down and then
manually restart. I tried a couple of fixes I found searching the groups
including going into the performance area and stopping the logging or
something, but nothing seems to work. No clues or correlations seem to exist
between what programs are open and when the freeze occurs. When frozen, ctl
alt del is ineffective and my mouse cursor is stopped in | mode. My cache is
clean, the pc defrags every night.

1 clue: unallocated space was found on my C partition (windows, xp pro)
after a couple check discs I ran, but even after running check disc again in
f mode and fixing the issue, I still have the same problem.

 

[Frank]

You would think that MS would use some of the $87 Billion
cash in the bank, to develop a reliable operating system.

 

[Jared Henderson [MSFT]]

This sounds like a hardware issue. You may want to try swapping out some of
the components to troubleshoot. I would start with the RAM and video card.