PC troubles.. please help!

[Psycrology]

About a week ago, my computer randomly began "hiccuping", in the middle of watching a movie. The hiccups became more and more severe and frequent over the following 5 minutes, until my PC was 100% frozen.


This happens every time i boot up, without fail, whether in safe mode or not. I ran every antivirus i could get my hands on, uninstalled every unnecessary program on my pc, (this took a long, long time, as i had to reboot every 20 minutes or so.


So i've essentially ruled out a software issue as far as i can tell, which means it must be my hardware...

i'm running a Gateway FX6840 with an i5-650 cpu, an r7 260x gpu, 8g ram, Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit.

A friend of mine said it could be a power supply or overheating issue, but after watching the temperatures through the entire boot-freeze process, it's not overheating. I suppose the power supply could be the culprit, but this PC has worked fine for about 4 years now... any help would be appreciated!!

 

[etaf]

run a chkdsk
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/67612-check-disk-chkdsk.html

and the PC does this regardless of what you are doing?

 

[dustyjay]

Gateway Power Supplies are not high quality units. Usually Bestec brand. 4 years is actually a good long run for a Gateway computer. A power supply problem could imitate any other Hardware and may software problems.

 

[Psycrology]

alright well then i suppose it makes sense that that would be the issue... guess i'll go grab a new one tomorrow. we'll see if that works

 

[crjdriver]

If you want to find out very quickly if it is a software/windows/driver problem OR a hardware problem, boot the system with a linux live usb/dvd. Watch a movie or whatever normally causes the freeze. If you have the same or similar problems when booting with linux, you know it is a hardware problem. If it runs fine under linux, you know the hardware is ok and it is a windows/driver/software problem.

I would use either linux mint or ubuntu for this task.

The above posts are correct; gateways come with low end parts and getting 4yrs out of it is really pretty good.