Hi all,

I have recently bought a new computer. Everything's running fine, got the latest drivers for everything etc. I only have one problem, and that is that my PC freezes every 30 minutes to one hour. Example :

I'm browsing the internet, iTunes is playing music at the background, MSN is running. Suddenly I can't click on anything, but I can still move my cursor. Music keeps playing. After 10 seconds I can't move the cursor anymore. A short while after that my music starts stuttering. If I click my mouse 5 times I hear a bleep, and then I can't do anything anymore. I can still see what I was doing though. The only solution to this is rebooting, as far as I know.

Specs :

Codegen M603-CA 450W
Sony/NEC AD7173 18x +/-writer
2048MB DDRII/800
Asus EN8800GTS/HTDP 320MB
250GB 7200 Maxtor STM3250310AS 8MB
Asus M2V S/R/GBL AM2
AM2 AMD Athl64 X2 4400 2.3GHz

What's going wrong exactly, and how can I solve it?

Hey there, could you post some process info from task manager? After next freeze-crash-thingie check out the temps and voltages from BIOS straight away.

http://www.memtest86.com/

Make a bootable CD from that program and test your RAM too. If it finds errors, one or more of your DIMMs is messed up.

Keep us posted!

Wow, thanks for your quick answer. I'll have a look, and I'll keep you updated.

edit: Burning the Memtest CD now.

:wow: You got a lot of stuff going on in the background! (Sorry for the stupid smiley)

I'm always drumming for Nlite and this is how clean you can get your XP without removing any critical functionality:



Kill the overlined processes (task manager -> end process) and do your ordinary surfing etc. to see if the freezes come back. If not, then you know one of the killed processes is causing the problems.



The Memtest86+ might take a while to test all of the RAM, but it's good to be safe.

It sure did take a while, over 1.5 hours. It said 'pass complete, press escape to exit'. No errors were found.

edit: "Niet actieve systeemprocessen" means "Inactive system processes". Can't abort that

edit2: The problem occured a lot while watching a flash video, or when having a site using Flash on the background.

Here's some info from Asus PC Probe II. Maybe this'll help you.

System running with only processes running you told me to, and uTorrent, iTunes and Firefox.

edit: Found out that so far my system has always crashed when I tried to view an MSN Space.

edit2: I think that Windows Live Messenger causes the trouble. I tried to right-click on of my contacts and then it froze again.

YASU, eh?

Who likes a game with SecuROM? :P

I 'bought' TDU .

edit: Now gimme some advice, Jack! :bowdown:

Memtest, Temperatures, Power Supply - all that springs to mind atm...

Not really sure

There goes your Genius reputation, mate .

I'm no Genius, i'm just pretty handy with hardware.

Crashes like that could be one of the following:
Dodgy memory,
Dodgy Power Supply,
Overheating,
Corrupted Application,
Corrupted drivers,
Corrupted Windows.

I'm geussing that i think it's likely to be Software related - perhaps the Error Log could through something up?

If your not averse to an experiment, partitioning your HDD and installing a second, nLited to hell, copy of XP can be done inside an hour, and can be used for experiements later - this should rule out software IF you use differnet drivers...

!!!

Suddenly my great brain remembers something.

Back in the days when I just had this computer and it'd crash, Windows would display an error after my pc had restarted, saying it had something to do with the GFX-card! Later on, the same crashes kept happening but I never saw the error message again.

I'll have a look, and see if I can find a screenshot of that error.

edit: This is the only picture I have. This is the detailed error message Windows gave me after I rebooted. You know, where it gives you an option to look at a detailed specification.

Update!

I did a SuperPi test, 2 applications of SuperPi with each his own core. I get this error with Core #1 (second core. First core is core #0).

edit: Never mind! I didn't have them in seperate folders!

nv4 to me suggests GFX drivers - tried installing the latest?

Mine are the lastest . 163.67

Uninstall -> Reboot -> Reinstall latest...?

I'll try.

edit: Updated them.

D'oh. It froze again, this time while I was listening to music, browsing the web, running a virus scan and talking on msn. I'm clueless. I've done CPU testing, RAM testing and reinstalled my GFX drivers.

Does anybody have a clue?

Errr... Have you tried underclocking your GFX card with Ntune?

Google finds plenty of Nv4.dll related freeze problems, but no real solution so far.

Any luck with older Nvidia display drivers?

mmm

You installed

A> motherboard drivers (and IDE/SATA)
B> Sound Card Drivers
C> CPU Drivers
D> Nvidia Drivers (id reccomend testing 162.18)

OS upto date directx, windows update ?

BTW 2.3ghz for CPU 0.0 ?

I think that CPU is 2.2 Ghz (2x1mb cache 11x multi)
so if some auto overclock is putting board @ 2.3 it maybe that HTT is at default (x5) which would also mean our hypertransport is exceeding maximum speed (5x200)

*edit noticed was AM2 CPU ^^^ ignore that *

More then likely my guess is PSU/Hdrive, have you tried switching PSU ?

^ that might be your problem

I don't have a spare PSU. PC crashed again this morning, I tried pressing ctrl+alt+delete a few times but then my screen went black, and I could only see the cursor.

other alternative is if you have spare HDD and spare time ,remove 320gb HDD plug in spare HDD , install XP to spare OS see if same bugs re-occur

I don't have a spare HDD either.

Problem occured again five minutes ago. I heard a bleep, then the top of my screen went black. Couldn't do anything. Rebooting was the only thing that worked.

Update! It's most likely my PSU. It's not powerful enough. Getting a replacement 550W PSU this Wednesday

try a spare gfxcard, and a pc-hardwaremonitor-plotter (temperatures-measurement and writing them into a file).
let things go as usually and view the file after a crash...

regards