Same old story....Intermittent Hanging in XP

I've formatted my 80 gig Maxtor to NTFS; since then all my problems went away but now I have one, very extremely annoying and dibilitating problem - that is, my PC hangs sporadically; there's no telling when or if it will. It could last a week from restart to a day, to a few hours. I'm in the process of getting a program to check my memory but I doubt that's the problem. I have all the newest software and drivers for my system and at any time, my PC's never reached higher than 53 degs. C. I've checked for IRQ, etc...etc. conflicts and nothing; I've tried removing USB peripherals but same deal....how do I test hanging if it's not 'a sure thing'? you ask? It's a sure thing when I run a FULL SCAN in Norton AV 2003'. I don't THINK it's my board because despite all the wierd things that used to happen to my PC before I went NTFS, hanging was never one of them. Recurring crashes? Yeah...my search not working? Yeah....data files messed up? Yeah.... but never ever a lockup so bad I can't use Ctrl+Alt+Del.... with this stuff I have to hit the reset or power button.

I've tried: Putting down/up mem speed, benchmarking the ram and hard drives, looking for patches for all my programs, another CPU, different RAM, you suggest it, I've PROBABLY tried it.

I'm here because I'd like more incoming ideas on what ppl think it may be. I used to have a hang problem whenever my software scanners of any kind would look into my uninstall folders, but I dealt with that by deleting the folders that I noticed the hang on and that worked....
But now with this hang, it's like coming from nowhere....I have my virtual mem set to around 2 gigs and my 512 megs is hardly ever maxed.....

Help?

Thanks....

 

Hi,

Do you have another video card that you could try swapping with the ATI Radeon? I wasn't able to find any specific issues relating to that particular adapter causing this problem in XP, but it could be the culprit.

Only other thing.....this is very unlikely and remote......but I read something somewhere about CD writers being related to hanging in XP. You could try disconnecting them, and seeing if the problem continues (then re-connect them one by one)......this might've been related more to the burning software being used (like DirectCD or something).......

Anyways, I'd try swapping the video card.....it's worth a shot.

Columbo

 

Thanks for your reply....

I've tried as you suggested and I just did the whole thing....I swapped to my old Voodoo 5500 and took off my burners and then ran Norton - same thing...it froze somewhere in about 80 percent of scanning....

This is beginning to drive me gaga. The only reason I don't redo everything is the thought that it's gonna happen all over again and my time and effor put into a clean install would have been wasted.

Any other suggestions?

P.S

I noticed during a check disk scan that my hard drive has 32kb of bad sectors - is there a possibility that (and I don't mean to make it sound humanoid or alive) the bad sectors are growing?

In the past, I had a western gigital that started out with about 5 megs of bad sectors and by the time I realized it (after a whole directory went to the digital void), the hard drive had about 200 megs of bad sectors....nevertheless, I sent it in for another.... my point being, they never seem to just stop at what you see them at, with time they seem to 'grow'.

I'm thinking maybe it's got more bad sectors and since I havent been able to do a thorough scan, there's nothing (short of a format) to 'flag' it.

Any ideas or thoughts on that?