Or, to rephrase … I’m having a problem with my stiupid computer.
To wit : The computer randomly stalls. Freezes. It won’t accept any input nor will any programs continue running.
I’m running Windows ME. There are two hard drives installed.
I can’t help but think it might be a hard drive problem. This is a computer that I put together myself, the only parts that were not brand new were the hard drives and an Adaptec video capture card. Those I took from my old computer where I was having the exact same problem. I’ve run complete surface scans on both under DOS and both come up clean. However, I cannot do a defrag on either without the computer freezing. Nor can I do a Virus Scan without it freezing. I also can’t run SpyBot without it freezing about 90% through although AdAware runs fine. Most other programs run tolerably okay.
I’ve also tried upgrading to Windows XP both in advanced and upgrade mode. The advanced (run as a CDROM boot) freezes on the user agreement screen and the upgrade (run through Windows ME) freezes at random times during the install process.
Is the CPU temperature OK? I was having all sorts of problems with my shiney new AMD 3000, until I took the plastic cover off the copper shim that goes in between the CPU and heatsink. Now, all is copacetic.
You should be able to check the temp by going into the bios and looking at ‘PC Health Status’ or some such screen.
My Dell laptop came with WinME and froze up all the time. My computer guy advised me that WinME was shite and I should format the drive and install a clean (full, not upgrade) version of Win2K Pro. No worries since.
Probably not the advice you were looking for, but that’s my experience.
It’s most likely to be one of two things: either a thermal issue, as Brutus suggested, or bad RAM.
The first is the easiest to address. Make sure all the fans are running, particularly the CPU heatsink fan. If they are, you might want to remove the CPU heatsink, scrape off any old thermal compound, apply a nice genrous layer of fresh compound and reattach the heatsink. Be sure to blow out any dust that may have accumulated in all of the fans and in the fins of the heatsink, as well.
The bad RAM issue is best diagnosed and resolved by substitution. Get a RAM stick that matches the others on your mainboard and replace them with the new stick, one by one, until the problem goes away. You may need to replace more than one stick, though multiple failures are unlikely.
Also be sure to pull out and reseat each expansion card, and to the same with all power and data cables for the various drives and other internal devices. Check to be sure the mainboard is securely mounted and not loose.
Sounds like a hardware problem. Check that all fans are working and running at the specified RPM. Also check if memory modules and all cards are properly seated.
Sounds like bad RAM to me. Download Memtest86 to easily check the RAM. If your PC freezes while the test is running, either your first few kilobytes of RAM are bad, or the problem is elsewhere.
If you used a cheap case that came with a power supply, you might want to consider replacing the power supply if the memory test doesn’t show any errors. Cheap PSUs can put out dirty power and that’ll cause trouble, but usually that only manifests under heavy loads.
When you say your computer freezes, do you mean permanently, or does it unfreeze after a few minutes?
Its not neccessarily bad RAM, perhaps it’s just not enough RAM. When I first got my computer, it had 256Mb memory, of which 64 is used for Video Memory. It had the same problem yours did, frequent freezing, it would lock up for several minutes at a time. Very annoying. After I added another 256Mb memory, all fine.
A few things I woud try before throwing down any money.
You may also consider your cables. I assume that you have IDE drives. Take the side off of the computer, turn it on. When it freezes push on the back of the IDE cabes on both drives. If you hear them click in or engage then replace the cables and see where that gets you. The second step in that test woud be to unpug our slave drive and see if it stil occurs.
ME is junk.
If you do decide to upgrade (please) build it with one drive. Add the second later.
In addition to al of the comments above, CD Rom drives can cause lock ups as well. You’ve got to have your drives detected in BIOS as well as within the Operating System.
Really good advice above as well.
Best of luck.