Basically, my computer has gone all odd. It hasn’t been used much, it’s not very old it’s running 1.6 GHZ and 256 MB of ram, so it isn’t too crappy to run.
A few nights ago I was playing some games on it and it was running fine. Then I shut it down and the next day when I turned it on again it just sorta… froze up and nothing moved: the mouse, warm boot and all the other things did nothing.
Sometimes when I turn it off and back on it makes an alarming noise (by it I mean the CPU =\ ) I havn’t installed anything new for ages and I don’t know of anything apparent to cause this to happen.
It freezes every time that I start it up now. Sometimes I can’t even get to he log-on screen, sometimes I can get into a game before it freezes, but it freezes after a few minutes. I don’t think it’s overheating, the fan’s still making it’s presence known. As I said, I havn’t installed any new hardware or software lately and it’s been running fine since we got it.
Is it possible that it might be a trojan horse that came with a no-cd crack for a game which I own a legal copy of?
If you’re sure it’s not a heat issue it sounds like hardware failure not virus related.
What motherboard and cpu is it? The different system beeps mean different things. eg: one long beep and two short could mean cpu failure…etc.
Another thing you could try is changing what slot the ram is in.(gut feeling tells me it’s bad ram)
Does it work alright in safe mode? (push f8 while booting) If you can get in try running Prime95’s torture test for at least an hour. It will give you an error if your system is unstable due to hardware.
There could be so many problems… the best thing is to try and narrow it down. Is it overclocked at all? Have you ever changed the ram timings? Do you have any extra parts or know anyone with the same type of system where you can swap parts to narrow down your problem?
Without knowing the board thus not knowing the beep codes you could always remove the ram and see if it gives the same beep. then put the ram back in and remove the cpu to see if it’s a different beep.
The fact that it freezes after a while does suggest overheating as one possible cause. One very common cause of overheating is dust, blown into the CPU heatsink by the fan. Check that the heatsink is not clogged with dust, is one suggestion. There are usually two fans in a simple computer: the fan within the PSU, and a smaller fan cooling the CPU directly. These often fail too. Some processors were able to continue running, albeit very hot, with a dead CPU fan, later faster CPUs do not take kindly to it.
I agree…I’ve fixed a couple computers that were acting this way, they were overheating, but they did not have dusty heat sinks, the fans were all running ok, yet the BIOS hardware monitor indicated very high CPU temps. To fix them, I removed the heat sink, cleaned off the transfer compound, and put some new transfer compound (I used Permatex Anti-Seize compound, which I already had in my auto repair shop) on, and put them back together…worked fine!
so just because there’s a fan and heatsink on the CPU, don’t assume that it is doing it’s job. You might need to reseat it, with new heat transfer compound.
First, check how warm the CPU is getting, using the hardware monitor, usually you need to press DEL or F1 or something to get into the setup program, then you can look for the hardware monitor selection and see what it says.
It could be the boot sector of the hard disk that is at fault.
The solution, I think, is to install a new hard drive and install all your software I’m afraid. Data can be retrieved by putting the old drive into the PC once it is running again, but not using it as the boot drive.
squirrel nailed your problem. i just went through a similar dilemma of random reboots and found that one of the corners of the heatsink had become detached from the motherboard; the heatsink wasn’t making very good contact with the CPU and overheating ensued.
I concur. I think the most likely causes are an overheating CPU due to dust and (maybe) bad ram. I think these are the only problems that would let you boot into windows and then freeze.
What I’ve done in overheating cases before is just take off the case and blow out the insides really well with a can of pressurized air (available at your local nerd/geek store) focusing on sinks and fans.
One thing, though…it is a Desktop, right? Not a laptop?
I am going to remove the cover and give it all a good blow (I’d insert a pun here, but they suck) momentarily.
Thanks for all of your suggestions.
At first I thought it might be the hardware, even though I don’t know much about computers. But my friend’s dad, who programs PDA’s suggested that it might be a virus, so that threw me right off!
Anyway, I’m off to give the computer a good clean.
Be sure to see if you can find the hardware monitor, and see what the CPU temp is…if there it is overheating from whatever cause, you don’t want to run it long, you need to fix the problem.
If you’re running Windows, you have to keep up to date with anti-virus, anti-spam and other things to keep all the nasties from infecting your computer over the Internet. Are you up to date with such things?
Beyond that, check the hardware as previously indicated, and see how things work after that. Then make sure your “protection” is up to date.
I opened her up and cleaned a bit of dust off the fan and tried to run it again and it didn’t work.
So I went down to my friends house thinking that it was probably just something loose in the machine and my friend’s dad opened up the computer and wiggled around a few chips and started it up and it ran perfectly!!
So it was just something loose.
Thanks again for all the suggestions!!
They were greatly apreciated, probably saved me a few dollars too!
I paid about $75 give or take AU to ship it from Germany (municycle.com)
Yeah, it costed a bomb load. Cheaper than shipping a whole unicycle though. My friend got a Devil and it costed 100 + to ship.
I only got the frame, seat post, seat clamp, hub and crankset from there though. I used my old rim and tyre. I bought the seat and pedals from Ryan Atkins when he was selling them.
