I’ve got a Falcon Talon, a bit over a year old. It seems to lock up on occasion, without any sort of pattern. I’ll just come into my office one day, and need to reboot to get it to do anything.
I’m familiar with overheating, but the most common symptom I’ve seen in the past is a complete reboot. This isn’t a reboot, it just locks.
All drivers are up to date.
One reason I suspect overheating is a week or so ago, I walked into my office one night and smelled the telltale smell of overheating electronics. I couldn’t trace it to any one component, but the grid behind my power supply (I think it’s an air intake) was hot to the touch. Normally it’s slightly warm to the touch. I turned off the computer and let it sit for a couple days as we were going out of town. Since then, I’ve had one or two lockups, and at least once the same place on the back of the case was hot to the touch. However, the lockups/hotness did not happen at the same time.
Right now, the computer’s been on for days, and nothing is hot.
Yes, it’s very likely an overheating issue. Open up the case if you feel comfortable doing so and vacuum out all the dust bunnies, cobwebs and/or cat hair in and around the fan(s), both on the motherboard and the power supply. Also check to be sure all the fans are running smoothly. If all this doesn’t alleviate the problem, consider installing a secondary case fan or two. Odds are it’s just dust buildup, though.
Falcon’s a pretty high-quality brand, but t’s not impossible that the power supply is just ever so close to underpowered or failing outright.
Have you upgraded the video or added any drives? I think they’re shipping Falcons with something like 650 or 750-watt power supplies, so there should be some headroom.
If you’ve already blown out all of the dust, and confirmed that all fans (and that box probably has anywhere from four to seven fans in it) are running, the next step might be to dismount the CPU cooler, clean it and the CPU off and reseat the cooler with fresh Arctic Silver or similar heat-transfer stuff. You might want to check the PC’s temperature monitor utility to see if the processor is running hot or not before messing with this.
I’ve made no changes to the computer since I got it.
All the fans are running, I definitely checked that.
I’m not going to pull off the CPU cooler. I don’t do hardware. If it comes to that I’ll bring it in somewhere. (Note: this is not because I can’t do it or am afraid of doing it. After 20 years in the computer business, I simply detest anything having to do with opening computer and dicking with hardware. I’m a software girl. I will pay someone else to dick with hardware if it comes to that.)
So I am intrigued by this “temperature monitor utility.” Never heard of that before. Where do I find such a thing?
There’s probably a small suite of utilities lurking in there somewhere, possibly in a folder called Falcon Utilities or something similar. Monitoring of fan speeds is often incorporated with these as well.
If you’re lucky, they’ll have provided a monitor utility that’s already set up to identify the various temperature sensors that are built into a motherboard and labeled them as “CPU” “Northbridge” “RAM Bank 1” and so forth. If not, you’ll probably wind up calling Falcon to sort out cryptic things like “LOCAL” or “TEMP1” and “TEMP2”
Thanks for the hints. I gave Falcon a call and they recommended some utilities to try. [and as an aside - this is why I love Falcon. I called their 800 number, a real person answered after 2 rings, and answered all my questions. Total time spent on tech support call: less that 5 minutes, zero of which were on hold.]
They mentioned that random lockups could be bad memory as well. So I’ll be doing memory tests, too.
I was going to say, if it’s not overheating (has it ever happened soon after turning on having been off for some hours?) then it’s a hardware fault; can be anything from the power supply to the memory (on system board or any peripheral board) to the CPU itself.
Software memory tests are almost worthless IMO, especially ones that run under Windows; ones where you boot off a custom floppy or CD are better but still not decisive. You might check that the memory sticks they’ve installed are absolutely identical to each other, if they’ve given you ones of different speeds or manufacturers that can be a problem too.
Have you got a canister of compressed air? Give the CPU and PSU a good squirt. But from your OP it sounds like something in the PSU has failed. A new PSU is cheap and I’d suggest that it be your techie’s first port of call.
I’m glad to hear this; I suspected the memory and downloaded memtest at Falcon’s advice. It started giving me failures on test #6. “Aha!” I thought, “I have a bad memory stick!”
So I pull one out, run it again. Same thing - perfect results until the sixth test, then a bunch of failures. Just to be sure, I swap the memory sticks and run it again. Same results.
At this point, I’m not believing it. Like I said, I’m no hardware guru, but the chances of both my memory sticks failing in the same way and me noticing nothing but a lockup every couple weeks seems pretty dubious.
I’m also running a temperature sensor from my motherboard manufacturer. It told me yesterday that my memory was running hot - not horribly hot, but 46-47 c instead of 45c. After leaving the computer off overnight and taking the case cover off, memory is running at about 42c. Is 47c all that bad?
Something tells me the real problem is not hardware based, and maybe it would go away if I’d just shut the computer down at night occasionally and give it somet time to cool down.
Multiple sticks of ram failing is not as uncommon as you might think, especially when those sticks are from the same batch.
You could have a flaky ram controller on your motherboard or cpu. This would account for your memory failures as well. Find a small independent shop and see if they are willing to try plugging in a known working stick of ram for you to test it.