[bendoc91]

Hello,
A few months ago I booted up my computer one beautiful spring day and all the icons came up blank. Nothing worked, I tried everything, countless registry repairs, virus and adaware scans and then one day it started working again.
Everything was fine for a few days, but a while later it started freezing. At first, it wasn't that bad. It would happen once every few days so it didn't bother me but recently it's gotten worse, way worse. It seems completly random. For the last 3 days or so my computer has been on non stop and it didn't freeze but today it froze up 3 times in about an hour. Seems random. Sometimes it happens while I'm surfing, sometimes watching a movie and sometimes the computer would just be idling.
When I say freeze, I mean everything dies. The mouse, keyboard and also the clock on the keyboard (LCD on G15, real pleasure) which allows me to monitor when did the freeze happen when I get back home and find my dead computer.
I have scanned my memory (Both Microsoft and Mem86) and foudn nothing. Scanend for viruses, adaware etc. and removed everything (I'm using Kaspersky Anti Virus + Adaware).
At some point I closed all the procceses but the necasseary ones and the computer didn't freeze for a little over a day (I had to turn it off because my fan needed hanging and I couldn't sleep with it on) so I'm not sure weather it really solved it or not.
Something else that I noticed is that my GPU runs at about 50 degrees celcius while doing non-heavy things (Surfing the internet right now and it's at 53) so I don't know if that's the problem. I have a fanless Nvidia Geforce 7600GT.

Thanks a lot for reading, I hope that someone has encountred this and might have a solution.

Cheers:-)
Ben

[NeonFx]

Maybe your hard drive(s) is failing. Try running "chkdsk c: -r"

Microsoft Support on chkdsk

[bendoc91]

I'm pretty sure that I checked the hard drive but I'll do it again right now althou it gave me -r invalid parameter so I just did a chkdsk c: and it's running right now. Thanks:-)
I'll report back

[bendoc91]

OK, I ran it (schedualed for the next reboot and I did) and it finished running. How do I see the resaults? I tried poking around the administrative log but didn't see anything. It's been about an hour since thou and no freezes but as I said before it doesn't mean a lot.
Thanks for the help:-)
And sorry for the typos it's 6:30am and I just found out that I have a dr's appointment at 07:00 (Didn't get to sleeping yet) so sorry:-)

Cheers!
Ben:-)

[NeonFx]

im sorry, but seeing as you ran the memtest86, RAM problems, which would be the most obvious reason for 'random' problems are out of the picture. running chkdsk with the /R parameter (sorry, it wasnt '-r' my bad) tells the chkdsk program to automaticaly try to fix whatever errors it finds while also locating bad sectors. running the program as is runs it in read only mode and its results are printed while it is running, not in any sort of log. so you'll have to run the test again (chkdsk c: /r).

if that doesnt solve the problem, you might want to run the memtest86+ test again, and run it for a longer period of time, so that it runs through all the tests. or, if you have two ram sticks, simply take one out, and if everything works, thats the bad one, or replace it in for the other one and if everything works then the other one is the bad one.

[bendoc91]

The computer just died again:-(
I'll try to remove 2 of the 4 sticks (Dual channel) and see if it makes a difference:-) Thanks for the adivce

[bendoc91]

Question, I have two sets of dual channel sticks ( 2 1 gigs and 2 512) The pairs dont sit side by side but rather in this order: 512mb 1gig 512mb 1gig. My graphic card is blocking one of the couples can I remove one stick from each pair? Or will it not work properly?
Thanks a lot

[NeonFx]

you do not generally need to worry about ram stick matchups on newer motherboards. the motherboard will always detect what a stick is capable of and adjust accordingly -- making all the sticks on the channel run at the weakest link's speed. All you need to make sure of is compatibility between a type of ram and the board and the maximum amount of memory it supports, and also... the only thing you cannot mix are registered and unbuffered sticks together on the same channel.


Check out the Ultimate Boot CD as a good option for computer testing programs you can use for free. memtest86+ is included in the suite.

[bendoc91]

Thanks for the quick reply:-)
I have just removed the RAM sticks one by one and every time my computer froze. I guess I'll try to run a slightly more robust test on my HDD than the Microsoft one. It's hard to believe that more than one stick of memory is malfunctioning because, well... It's RAM!
Is it possible that this is a software problem? Like I said before when I closed all the programs the computer did not freeze but I wasn't able to test that for long and I tried it again but it froze althou I'm not sure if I closed eveyrthing that I did the last time. Should I try to reinstall Windows or will that be a waste of time?
Other than that, I'll run UBCD and see what happens.
Thanks a lot:-)
Ben

[NeonFx]

yeah thats also possible, but it seems quite improbable to me. you could go into msconfig and disable a bunch of startup programs see if any of those are malfunctioning, but windows will typically let you know if that ever happens, because it is made in such a way that a single program crashing will not crash the whole system. (nonresponsive programs and such).

there is also the possibility, as you mentioned earlier that you are overheating some of the components inside your computer. you might want to look into getting another fan.

also, theres the worst case scenario where something physically on the motherboard has gone bad... if thats the case then you're out of luck seeing as that cannot be fixed.

try reinstalling windows. what the hell

[bendoc91]

My main concern is that I'm slightly lazy and backing all my data up etc. will take me a considerable amount of time but I guess it wouldn't do any harm.. I'm running the long running test on my HDD right now (Last ditch effort) and if it on't find anything I'll start going on everything one by one (Sheesh)
Thanks a lot for the help:-)