What could cause my computer to just freeze up unexpectedly?
It doesn’t happen all the time. It generally happens when I am trying to print a large picture (although short text files print fine.) It also happens when my daughter is playing “The Sims”; the whole computer will just lock up; the monitor will freeze up showing whatever was on the screen at the time of the freeze, but will not accept and keyboard or mouse commands. It is as if the computer just stopped where it was in the space-time continuum. Restarting will get it going again, but will freeze if I’m printing the same picture; not necessarily at the same place that it stopped before. Strange.
This is a home built computer. This used to happen as well on my old computer and I had thought it was a disc drive problem since the drives were the only thing I took from the old one to the new one. But I put in a new drive and it still happens.
What could be causing this? What should I be looking for?
I was going to suggest you might have some bad RAM, which brings up another question – what’s a good way of determining if your RAM is going bad? My stepdaughter has been having this problem a lot lately with her computer (my former computer) – it freezes, or she gets the Blue Screen O’Death, etc. I found a utility – on the Microsoft support site I think – that is supposed to extensively check your RAM for errors, and I ran it a couple times and never found anything bad, but I still suspect it’s the RAM because the behavior is similar to what I was seeing before I replaced the original RAM in that machine a few years back, and when I put in new RAM the problem stopped.
I’ve known computers to freeze because of overheating CPUs. Not that this is likely to be the cause but you could try downloading one of the many utilities which tell you how hot your cpu is getting.
Update the driver for your display adapter. Look in the **Device Manager ** (**Start ** button, right click My Computer, select Properties, then Hardware and then Device Manager (WinXP). Double click Display Adapter, and note the manufacturer and model number. Go to the manufacturer’s website, look for support or downloads, and find the corresponding driver for you adapter. Download it and open the file; most manufacturers have an installer that will configure it automatically for you, Restart, and your freezes should thaw quickly.
Memtest86 can diagnose RAM errors; boot from the floppy, set the test running before bed and come back to it the next day when you get home from work.
Other causes for sudden inexplicable freezes are:
Thermal failure: Make sure your fans and vents are free of dust and debris. Open the case and use a can of compressed air to clean off your CPU and GPU heatsinks.
Failing power supply: An old power supply might be able to limp along undetected for a while before undercurrent problems actually show up. Your BIOS should be able to show you what the voltages are on a few of the important “rails”.
Accidental overclocking: If your CPU is not really the CPU you think you bought, your BIOS could be asking too much from it. Double-check that your CPU is designed to run at the clock speed and multiplier you’re using. Try dialing back the front-side bus speed in the BIOS and see if that improves stability. You may notice a major improvement with as little as 10MHz of FSB. If you’re running 1.33GHz (10x multiplier and 133 FSB) consider dialing your FSB back to 100, and if it’s stable, then increase the multiplier a half-step at a time. You could conceivably get a system running at 1.25GHz that’s much more stable!
Accidental overclocking part deux: make sure your RAM latency and timings are accurate for the RAM you have installed.
Just a small warning. The above is likely to work, but I did this and made things worse. I updated Nvidia drivers and ended up with a irrecoverable blank screen every time I started windows. I couldn’t roll back, couldn’t start in safe mode, couldn’t use the recovery console. I ended up re-installing windows.
It might be wise to uninstall the old drivers before attempting to install the new ones (in the ideal world this should be unnecesary, but things are never ideal). and make sure your card is on the list of supported cards even if the drivers claim to be unified (cover all cards for that brand)
Jurph, I think that is the utility I used but I only let it run for a couple of iterations, not overnight. I figured if it didn’t find something in the first half hour or so, then it probably wasn’t going to find anything at all.
On the other hand, your next two suggestions are definitely something to check out, especially the power supply. I’ve completely rebuilt this machine at least once, and made various other upgrades over the years. The power supply is about the only remaining piece of original equipment in there, and it’s gotta be at least five or six years old.
Bad RAM usually manifests itself in odd, random ways, usually with a BSOD. Bad RAM also doesn’t seem to just “crop up” out of nowhere, unless you had a power surge or lightning strike. If the computer has worked fine for a while then suddenly starts freezing, it’s probably not RAM (unless you had one of the aforementioned power spikes).
If the computer seems to work fine for a while but then freezes up, then works again and freezes up, it’s typically either the power supply or any of the system fans (including any you might have on the video card).
To test for a bad power supply, reach around back and see if you can feel any air coming out the back of the PS. No air = no fan = no cooling. You can also open the case while the PC is running and touch the power supply. It can be either warm or cool, but if it’s hot enough to make you flinch, replace that puppy.
The system fans are pretty easy to diagnose - open the case and see if they’re all moving. If you have a box fan at home, you can also leave the case open (assuming that it’s a tower) and position the fan next to it such that it’s pulling air out. If your lock-ups cease, you have a cooling problem.
Sounds to me like it’s more likely to be the old swap-file dance, plus some kind of minor low-level glitch pertaining to disk read or write or seek operations.
You said it happens with large images. Most graphics software (especially sw that is equipped to do editing, not just display of images) open the image then page a lot of it out to temp files. Most printer drivers also spool the printer instructions to a temp file that gets spat out to the actual printer at the rate the printer can take it. Meanwhile, all modern operating systems page out the contents of RAM to memory swap files as well. I don’t know for sure about the Sims but maybe it writes lots of temp files to help it render all the splines or whatever they’re called to generate the onscreen image?
You did say you’d tried running from a different physical drive and had the same symptoms. It’s possible that you’ve got minor allocation table / directory corruption on both drives, but I agree that it’s far less likely.
But the SCSI or ATA controller could be mildly unhappy. Or the data cable to the drive. Or one or more of the fast caches of the drive may be experiencing problems flushing (writing) to the actual disk under momentary heavy-use situations for some reason.
Any such thing could be causing freezes when the OS is putting the hard disk through its paces, accessing different sectors and tracks and reading from them and writing to them and swapping what’s on them in short order as is the case when you’ve got a large image file open and go to print it.
Try this: open 3 or 4 “movie” files (.avi, .wmv, .mov, .mpg, etc.), big ones if you have them, and set them all to playing simultaneously. If it’s disk read-write-seek problems as I suspect, I bet that generates a freeze as well.
I’ve seen similar problems on computers with cheap motherboards. Some problems can be fixed by updating the BIOS on the motherboard to the latest version released by the manufacturer. Many cheap motherboards will work OK until they are stressed, then they silently lock up. The stress can be something like a graphically demanding computer game, backup software, or programs that do a lot of network I/O.
Most PCs are designed to be cheap, not reliable or maintainable. Features that could prevent or identify the cause of errors are omitted. You want cheap, you get cheap.
After checking to see if all the fans are working correctly, take the case or side panel off the PC and direct a fan to blow into the PC directed mainly toward the CPU area. Then use normally .
If the lockups cease it’s likely to be an overheating problem, which you can usually address with better fans or a bigger case.