computer completely freezes randomly

[Marty2003]

Recently my secondary computer (AMD Duron 850MHz, VIA mobo, 320 RAM) has started to freeze completely at completely rantom times. The mouse and keyboard will stop responding, if I'm listening to music it will stop and the screen will display the exact same screen that was shown when it froze, no blue screen or anything.

Sometimes it happens when encoding, sometimes when websurfing. Sometimes the computer will be running for several hours before a freeze, other times it will only be running for a few minutes. I have to manyally cut the power and reboot to use it again. In fact it froze the first time I was writing this and I had to re-type all this. The fact that it's completely random seems to me like it's a hardware problem.

I've removed all PCI cards, and ran the computer on each of my single RAM chips, one at a time and the freezing persisted. I even ran RAM integrity checks to test if they're faulty, but they seem good. That seems to rule out any PCI or RAM problems. I also ran a hard disk surface scan. I believe the problem is either with the CPU, Power supply, motherboard or an overheating problem. I doubt it overheating because sometimes the comp is running at low CPU-usage for a very short time and it still freezes, Other times I'm encoding for several hours before a freeze.

Has this happened to anyone before, or does anyone have any suggestions. I'm about to re-install XP as a last ditch effort, but that'll take several hours and isn't something I really want to do.

I don't need to upgrade as this computer is really more like a backup, and only get's used when two people need to use a comp at once, or if I'm encoding two things at once. My main computer is working fine, but I don't want to scrap this one.

[bazooka]

Update your motherboard bios.

This used to happen to me.

My main system is an 800Megahertz Duron and I tried everything.

When I flashed the bios, it fixed it.

[jimmalenko]

I've had it on occasions with an older machine and it was heat-related. I ended up chucking a couple of extra fans in it and no more freezing. Does the box sit in a well-ventilated spot ? You might try taking the outer casing off and using just a normal desktop fan to blow into the guts of the PC, while making it work. I normally just set up a dummy MPEG2 encode with TMPGEnc, and set the in-built noise reduction filter to insanely high values. This makes my PC work pretty hard for at least 24-36 hours.

[Garibaldi]

If you just upgraded to SP2 that could do it... I heard about some incompatibilities with old motherboard BIOS and SP2, so I would try what bazooka said and update the motherboard BIOS (and firmware).

[Marty2003]

Thanks for the suggestions.

Compaq doesn't seem to have an updated firmware for my mobo, so it looks like I'm out of luck there.

I upgraded to SP2 when it first came out and it's been running fine until just now, so that's probably not it.

I have been running it with the case open with plenty of ventilation room around it, and it doesn't seem to change anything, the freezes still seem completely random. I'll try to find a small desktop fan and see if it helps.

[ViRaL1]

Sounds like it could be a memory problem also. If you can try isolating sticks of memory by running without 1 or the other for a day that might help in diagnosing.

[Heywould3]

what is your CPU temp? sometimes fans get dirty and dont work as well even if you have case open.. look in bios after its been on for a while.. or use a mobo minitor to watch it.. let us know