Re: Thoughts on a lock-up?

"Chris Newton" <please.reply@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4617a522$0$19247$da0feed9@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi all,

My PC has an intermittent lock-up fault that's been developing over
the past few weeks, which I'm having trouble tracking down. Any
suggestions would be welcome.

It's running XP SP2. The machine is an Athlon XP 2100+ that I put
together around four years ago. All the components were good quality
kit and have been working fine until recently.

The lock-up happens out of the blue, in the middle of typing, playing
a game, or just while idle. All input devices go dead, the screen
image freezes, and it requires a hard power-off to reset.

The lock-up was first seen while playing some moderately graphically
intensive games (e.g., Quake III). It has now expanded to locking up
the system during routine use of lightweight Windows applications
(e-mail and web browsing, editing word processor documents, etc.).

I don't have much to go on. There is nothing in the event log to
indicate a software failure, at least not one that left time to record
it. On restarting, my second hard-drive (and old 8GB unit that I
transferred from a previous PC) often isn't seen by the BIOS.

The most recently installed stuff is a Belkin 54g USB wireless adapter
and the corresponding software, plus whatever security updates
Microsoft have shipped out over the past few weeks. The initial fault
was observed before this, I think.

Prior to that, I had tried updating my graphics card drivers (for a
Radeon 9800 Pro) to the latest Catalyst release from ATI, wondering
whether there was some problem there when I first saw the system lock
up in-game. The later versions of the drivers all failed to work
properly, and I reverted to my previous "known good" (hopefully)
version.

The last stuff before that was a new keyboard and mouse a few months
ago, both USB and unfortunately stuck with extra buttons and software
drivers. Doesn't anyone make old-fashioned 102/105 key keyboards any
more? :-(

This is driving me up the wall. At first it happened rarely and only
while playing games, but now it's taken out my system twice in the
past 24 hours, costing me a significant amount of work each time.

If anyone has seen anything like this before, or can think of any
useful diagnostic tests I can run to try and track it down, then your
advice would be most welcome!

Thanks,
Chris

Try leaving it in the locked up state for an hour or two and see if control
returns. Sometimes a process takes 100% cpu and won't relinquish any cycles
until it has finished what it was trying to do. Motherboard may be at fault
as indicated by problem picking up other hard drives. Try it with these
drives disconnected as they may also be the problem.

In my experience that kind of hard freezing is usually down to graphics card
or driver. Have you checked the fan on the 9800pro? Set up your system with
minimal configuration - keyboard, mouse and graphics card only. Set up some
fairly graphics and cpu intensive program to loop (I use the demo from the
old 3DMark2001 as this can be set to loop with or without sound) and see if
the lockup occurs. Buy or borrow an old graphics card (NOT ATI as you
don't want it accessing the ATI drivers) and see if the lockups disappear.
Something like a PCI S3 Virge would be ideal and can be found for less than
£5 inc on ebay. If the lockups disappear then you need to troubleshoot your
9800pro and drivers. If the lockups persist then look at other cards and
peripherals as possible culprits.

--
Tony
'04 XL1200C, '95 LS650
OMF#24


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