Terrible PC troubles..

[SE14man]

Hi,

For a nimber of years now my pc has been locking up completely.
I have changed many hard drives but still no luck!

Please tell me what else it could be problems with.
Someone once mentioned a BIOS upgrade how would i do this?

Cheers!

[guns1inger]

Do you get a blue screen when it locks, or does it just freeze ?

There can be several causes for complete lock ups without a reboot or bluescreen. The most common would be ram going bad, low power supply, and over heating.

Ram can be tested using the ramtest ISO from Microsoft, or one of the free ram test applications available on the net.

Over heating can be tested for by pulling the side off your case, and pointing a small desk fan into the insides of the case. If the system no longer locks up, go and buy yourself a decent cooling system.

Low power supply is harder to test for nicely, but a simple way is to disconnect several hard drives from the power supply and see if the problem persists.

Most other issues would produce either a blue screen, or force the system to restart after flashing (very briefly) a blue screen.

[SE14man]

Very helpful reply there you gave me!

I am not getting any blue screens.
It is a complete lock up!
So much so even waiting days for it to unfreeze the only thing to do is to reset the pc.
It's completely locked up.
One important thing you should know is that it does it for ages.
I wouldl iterally reset it and at start up it would do it again it's been known to do this at least 20 times in a row!
For the past 3 years now and has buggered up countless hard disks as you can well imagine!


I keep[ the side off the pc anyway.

Please tell me what you think its likely to be!

Mart.

[guns1inger]

Time to buy a new PC.

[SE14man]

what one would u recommend mate

[guns1inger]

If I had lots of money, I would probably look at something from the AlienWare range : http://www.alienware.co.uk/main.aspx

However I don't, so I would be building something from scratch. Depending on budget, Quad code, 2 GB ram, 8800 GTS gfx card, and shed loads of disc. Monster power supply and lots of cooling in a good case.

[jagabo]

For a nimber of years now my pc has been locking up completely.

Open up your case and blow all the dust out. Make sure all fans are still working. Download SpeedFan and check your CPU, chipset, case, and drive temperatures.

Diagnosing other problems is difficult if you don't have spare parts lying around. If your computer is a "number of years" old it may be time for a new one anyway. Forget Alienware. They are for gamers with a lot more money than sense.

[Nelson37]

Fire it up and press F1 or whatever to get to the BIOS setup screen. Then, do nothing whatsoever.

Blowing the dust out is good, also double-check keyboard connection and possible jammed keys.

If it locks up in the BIOS, OS and HD are out of the picture, except for electrical short on the HD. Power supply would be first thing to replace, easy, cheap, likely to be the problem, and can be used on a new PC.

Disconnect all drives, power and data, and do the test again, Power supply, RAM, motherboard, CPU pretty much in that order. Don't buy any parts unless they are usable on a new PC.

Why did you not replace this under Warranty three years ago, how have you been dealing with this for this long?

An issue that long and that regular increases the probability that the problem is CPU,RAM, or MOBO.

[classfour]

1. Win XP SP2 is a free download - or M$ can mail you the disc if you request it.

2. Why replace the HDD? Were you defragging on a regular basis?

3. Clean the dust out.

4. Re-seat the RAM

Defrag, defrag defrag the hard drive(s)

If it still locks up, check the motherboard capacitors closely, as you may have one that has over heated. look for deformation, swelling, etc.. If there are not any obvious motherboard issues, remove the CPU, re-seat it; apply new high quality thermal paste - and make certain the fan is clean - to the tiny fins, etc..

Replace the power supply with a high quality unit. I've bought two or three cheapo power supplies that fried motherboards - but passed psu tests.

[stars]

Hi...

Maybee this is your problem hopefully not....

I had some strange total lookups sometime ago...

The problem was a very nasty virus/trojan spyware whatever.

It started a process that tock 100% cpu power every 20 sec...

And it was sending data to the net..

I had to shut down the modem and take a look in the router logs...

Identify the files with f-secure and delete them manually.

netcmd.exe and netcmd.cfg...

And after that cut the power to the computer and wait 10min

They were memory restitent...

And finally edit out the call of the files in the registry...

stars...