Computer is Freezing

[Vdubcab]

Ok....heres the story. I have a Western Digital 40gig ata 100 harddrive. Soyo Dragon MB. Windows 98se. I bought my system only 2months ago. Built it myself.......built a few computers. Anyway, my system started freezinng(mouse froze, keyboard froze) all the time. After startup and after being on the net for 5 min it would freeze. Then I'd restart and it would freeze right after startup, I'd restart then it would be fine. Then a couple days later it would do the same thing but only worse to the point where I'd have to restart it 7 times to get it to run stable. Then it started to do it again only this time I couldn't get it to come up at all. I talked with a friend and he suggested it was the Harddrive so I went out and bought the same drive and returned the old one. Now after owning the new drive three weeks into it it starts freezing again, just like before. I'm really confused and am starting to think its the MB. I really have no idea, just now I popped the startup disk and booted it into DOS I ran scandisk and it reported that the space available on my HardDrive was incorrect and I fixed that, restarted and now I'm typing this message and so far it hasn't froze..... was that the problem or is it the MotherBoard or is it the Hard Drive, I am really confused and upset. Any words or advise would be greatly appreciated. Thank you
Dan

 

[BEL6772]

Poor thermal solutions can cause erratic behavior. Viruses can cause erratic behavior. PC health/monitoring programs with all options turned on can cause problems. Have you already eliminated those possibilities?

You mentioned that you have run scandisk and found problems. Have you also run defrag? If not, it might help.

Have you taken a look at all your background apps? Even on new 'puters a ton of stuff running in the background can make it run like molasses in February.

Of course, there could be some hardware problems, but in my experience, this type of behavior is usually software related.

Let us know how it goes

 

[Vdubcab]

Yeah, I've checked in to all of that. Well my computer hasn't froze yet. Still waiting to see if what I did in DOS was the problem.

 

[spalding]

How did you correct the HD problem. Did you flash the bios to the most recent version. If you installed the same software on both HD you may be running into a conflict. Run msconfig from the run menu and take a look at your start up file. Anything look like it shouldn't be in there?

 

[Vdubcab]

I corrected the problem by running scandisk from my startup floppy. It found the error and fixed it. It seemd to be doing fine now but who knows when it will happen again?