OK, I’m about as PC geeky as they come but I’m having a doozy of a problem with my PC at home.
When XP is idle for about 10 minutes, it locks up. Sometimes I can catch it before it locks up solid and the mouse will still work but everything else is unresponsive. 3 finger salute does not work, and neither does the power button. Only a hard reset will get me out.
This only happens when idle. Last night I left Everquest running for 8 hours without any keyboard/mouse activity with no problem. There has to be a process running that only kicks in when the PC is idle, but I can’t figure out what it is.
What say you all? I’m about at the end of my rope, and a reload in imminent unless I can get this figured out today.
My troubleshooting so far…
- Checked system resources, I left Process Monitor running, and no CPU/memory issues.
- I disabled all power saving in windows and the BIOS.
- Disabled all unneeded services, including Indexing. Also shutdown all processes except Microsoft specific things.
- Disabled System Restore on all drive.
- Checked power/temp in the BIOS right after a lockup. Temp is low 40’s and no real issues with the voltage.
- removed that MS patch that screws with XP (811493? something like that)
- Assume all up to date drivers.
My system:
Athlon 1900+
MSI MB
3 hard drives (JBOD on MB RAID controller - HPT 370)
1024 meg Crucial PC 2100
XP Pro SP1/most hotfixes
SB Audigy
ATI 9700 non-pro (flashed with 9700 Pro bios)
Antec 400W power supply
tons of fans
CD-ROm (master on Primary IDE)
CD-R (master/secondary)
6 USB devices with powered USB hub.
3com 10/100 NIC