Comp freeze

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woodchip
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Comp freeze

Post by woodchip »

Been having a problem lately with the comp hard freezing to the point nothing works and I have to push the belly button key to get it to re-start. Since I was also getting color garbling in you tube vids I thought it was my gpu card as it was running 90c. Took the housing off and cleaned all the dust out of everything. Put card back in and it runs at 65c but still get same problems. CPU cores are 34,31,25, 27c. So is the hard lock something that might be caused by the vid card or the power supply (is there a app to test it?) OS is win xp and comp is pushing 10 years of age.

edit add. The locks seem to only occur when I am on the net and sites with vids like news sites and game sites are the main culprets. I run Mozzilla with ad stop running.
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Re: Comp freeze

Post by Krom »

Good call on cleaning it out, 90c is typically borderline for a video card but back at 65c it shouldn't be having problems anymore. They say running chips for prolonged periods at near their maximum temperature can damage them, however that is mostly in theory and requires pushing it hard with overclocks too, in practice it would take way longer than most people would ever be using them (decades) so I wouldn't worry about that. I've never personally seen a chip fail from running excessively long at its maximum temperature unless it was also overclocked and overvolted to its limits (and its almost always the voltage that kills them in those cases).

A more common symptom of a failing PSU would be that the system wouldn't turn on in the first place (or would require several attempts like starting an old/cold lawn mower), so while its possible I wouldn't put a lot of time into checking that beyond a quick look.

What I'd look for at this point is check all the contacts and check the memory chips on the video card and make sure there is no dust or grime stuck between the pins that could short them out. Another thing to try would be to find some hardware appropriate video card benchmark/stress test utility and run some of those. Keep an eye out for visual glitches/artifacts while running them or if the system reliably freezes during a video benchmark then it would make one suspicious of the video card.

Something you could use to help narrow the culprits would be to run a pass or two of memtest86+ ( http://www.memtest.org/ ), this will hit the CPU a little and system RAM a lot, but should effectively ignore the video card, so if it passes then 99% of the time the CPU and system RAM are healthy and you don't need to worry about them.
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Re: Comp freeze

Post by Jeff250 »

Why only 99%? If you run it overnight (or longer), there should be 0 failures.
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Re: Comp freeze

Post by woodchip »

I ran memtest way back when I built this comp. ran it for a hour or so and it came up with no problems. Ran it for 24 hours and found out at least 1 stick was bad. Luckily it was Dominator ram and I got new replacement for free.
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Re: Comp freeze

Post by Krom »

Run it again anyway, after 10 years it could have changed (but faulty memory would usually cause BSODs, not this issue).
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Re: Comp freeze

Post by woodchip »

Finally found my memtest disk and am running now. So far after 4 hours it hasn't found anything. i'll let it keep running until tomorrow.
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Re: Comp freeze

Post by woodchip »

Well 20 passes later (21 hours) and no errors (Memtest86 v4.10) so it appears the memory is not the problem. Next I'll try and find a vid card tester.
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Re: Comp freeze

Post by woodchip »

Ran furmark stress for 30 minutes and nothing happened. Ran benchmark and got a 937 score (15 fps, 60000ms). Temp 75 C. Vid card is a radeon series 4800. Soooo...any other ideas why comp would freeze up randomly?
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Re: Comp freeze

Post by snoopy »

woodchip wrote:Ran furmark stress for 30 minutes and nothing happened. Ran benchmark and got a 937 score (15 fps, 60000ms). Temp 75 C. Vid card is a radeon series 4800. Soooo...any other ideas why comp would freeze up randomly?
Bit rot on a critical system file?
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Re: Comp freeze

Post by Krom »

Open an administrative command prompt and type: sfc /scannow

More details:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/libr ... 91008.aspx

Also since furmark and memtest work, try prime95 (torture test) on the CPU.
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Re: Comp freeze

Post by Foil »

woodchip wrote:edit add. The locks seem to only occur when I am on the net and sites with vids like news sites and game sites are the main culprets. I run Mozzilla with ad stop running.
The above from the first post would make me suspect something in software (e.g. on my work machine recently, I had some hard browser lockups on certain sites with Mozilla Firefox, until I updated a couple of the plugins).
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Re: Comp freeze

Post by woodchip »

Snoopy....bit rot?

Foil...only have ad block and a pdf convertor as plug in

Krom.... I'll look at what you suggest
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Re: Comp freeze

Post by Krom »

I wouldn't rule out a software cause, but even XP isn't that easy to hard lock in software. Although I suppose there could be some unknown worm or exploit out there causing it...

(Perhaps now would be a good time to consider building a newer system and upgrading to windows 7?)
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Re: Comp freeze

Post by woodchip »

I do have a newer system but I tend to use that only for gaming. The problem comp is used for net surfing and collecting my emails. Would installing win 7 improve anything without upgrading the hardware?
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Re: Comp freeze

Post by Krom »

If the problem is software, it probably would, if the problem is hardware, it probably won't. Although Windows 7 is a bit more fault tolerant than XP, especially when it comes to problems with the video drivers.

However it might just make the computer unbearably slow, 7 is considerably more demanding on resources than XP was.
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Re: Comp freeze

Post by snoopy »

woodchip wrote:Snoopy....bit rot?

Foil...only have ad block and a pdf convertor as plug in

Krom.... I'll look at what you suggest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation
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Re: Comp freeze

Post by woodchip »

Well so far I got videos to play. Seems all I had to do was right click on vid and uncheck hardware acceleration. Did a new malwarebytes scan and got a large number of pups. (ran malware like 3-4 days ago and got none). Removed those so now to see if I got the freeze problem fixed.
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Re: Comp freeze

Post by snoopy »

woodchip wrote:Well so far I got videos to play. Seems all I had to do was right click on vid and uncheck hardware acceleration. Did a new malwarebytes scan and got a large number of pups. (ran malware like 3-4 days ago and got none). Removed those so now to see if I got the freeze problem fixed.
Interesting... my wife's been having lot of problems with Chrome/Adobe Flash crashing out pages, and in the process dragging the computer down to a grind. I wonder if the root of your issues (and my wife's) is the latest version of flash?
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