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Nuked PC: Possible hardware troubles?
kriegs
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Howdy, Help/Advice forum. My friend had recently been complaining about rampant freezes on his PC. I went over there tonight and asked him a simple question: "Is there anything on your hard drive you want to keep?" No is the answer I got, so I went ahead and nuked him (Windows XP btw). He had a bunch of junk, never bothered to update anything, never defrag'd, and just generally let his PC go to shit, so I figured it would be just fine to go ahead and nuke it.
On my first attempt to reinstall Windows, it managed to freeze up as I was scrolling through the list of time zones for his clock. Cussing to myself, I restarted and formatted again. This time it finished installing everything and was able to get to the desktop. I go through the motions of updating Windows, etc. I had gone for a good 15 or so min with no freezes, so I declared victory. No sooner than I had finished that thought, BAM, frozen. I restart and try to download some more drivers and anti-virus. Frozen again.
Every time I restart, it seems to be a random amount of time before it freezes again. I took note of what I was doing at the time, and I noticed no significant actions on my part that may be triggering it.
I should have written down what he had exactly, but off the top of my head I can come up with the following statistics:
Systec motherboard (I'll get the model from him later)
ATI Radeon 9600
2.X Pentium 4 processor
1 gig ram (pretty sure)
My premature diagnosis (and complete lack of experience) points to the motherboard. The thing is pretty old if I remember correctly. His hard drive seems just fine. Not quite sure how to check and see if his processor is working properly. I left before I could check his ram. I'll probably give him a call tomorrow and see what I can talk him through on the phone so I don't have to drive over there again.
Any ideas of what else might be wrong? Since it froze during Windows installation, I'm pretty sure it's not due to other software going haywire.
On my first attempt to reinstall Windows, it managed to freeze up as I was scrolling through the list of time zones for his clock. Cussing to myself, I restarted and formatted again. This time it finished installing everything and was able to get to the desktop. I go through the motions of updating Windows, etc. I had gone for a good 15 or so min with no freezes, so I declared victory. No sooner than I had finished that thought, BAM, frozen. I restart and try to download some more drivers and anti-virus. Frozen again.
Every time I restart, it seems to be a random amount of time before it freezes again. I took note of what I was doing at the time, and I noticed no significant actions on my part that may be triggering it.
I should have written down what he had exactly, but off the top of my head I can come up with the following statistics:
Systec motherboard (I'll get the model from him later)
ATI Radeon 9600
2.X Pentium 4 processor
1 gig ram (pretty sure)
My premature diagnosis (and complete lack of experience) points to the motherboard. The thing is pretty old if I remember correctly. His hard drive seems just fine. Not quite sure how to check and see if his processor is working properly. I left before I could check his ram. I'll probably give him a call tomorrow and see what I can talk him through on the phone so I don't have to drive over there again.
Any ideas of what else might be wrong? Since it froze during Windows installation, I'm pretty sure it's not due to other software going haywire.
kriegs on
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Posts
If the CPU fan would be dead then it would probably freeze more consistently... unless it spins from time to time, and I think he'd have to have a heap of dust for it to freeze during installation.
Cleaning the case is a good idea anyway though.
It might be some problem with not enough voltage going to the CPU, RAM or chipset, which might be caused by the PSU, motherboard or the components themselves aging and needing higher than default voltage.
You can often check the voltages in the BIOS, and if they're not very close to the target values then it's most likely the PSU at fault or maybe the motherboard voltage regulators. If it's close then it might be the CPU/RAM aging.
In any case, you can try increasing it a little bit if there's an option to do that in the BIOS.
Even if there aren't any voltage options in there it's likely you'll be able to slow down the memory, which might help if that's what's causing problems, but will also reduce performance.
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