Computer Freezing!?

[AZGirl24]

I don't know what else I can do?! My computer kept freezing up so my brother in law deleted everything off my computer and reinstalled Microsoft XP hoping to fix the problem. It didn't fix it! It still freezes up on me, when I am in the middle of doing something online, and when I walk away from it for a couple minutes and come back it's always frozen! Any suggestions are VERY appreciated, I am about to take a hammer to this piece of crap :mad: LOL

Thanks!!
AZgirl24

[Chaky]

Are there any symptoms like HD led being constantly on when it freezes? Are there any error messages, BSODs..?

Maybe the event viewer holds some clues of what is wrong with the machine.

First - Check for cooling issues. I've had this come up on me numerous times, with memory overheating, video overheating, etc. The easiest way to check this is to remove the cover off the case and set a small desk fan directed into the computer. See if you can run stable with that. If so, then look into some cooling solutions. First make sure all optional fans in your case are installed. Usually an 80mm fan in front, sometimes in the rear... sometimes multiple ones. Otherwise something like the GlobalWin CAF12 card cooler, which sits above the cards and blows air over them(or something similar). Alternatively the Antec cases are quite nice, and you can get some of them with side panels with built in fans to blow over cards.

Second - Driver issues. Make sure you have the up to date BIOS on the motherboard. Any BIOS updates to video cards, etc. Install latest drivers for sound, network, etc. On motherboards with VIA chipset install the latest 4in1 drivers. (Although sometimes this causes issues, for instance the latest nVidia drivers are not compatible with the drivers for the WinTV card under XP, I found out... but I got bluescreens)

Third - Hardware Compatibility issues. This is harder to diagnose as you may need to swap out hardware. Start removing accessory cards... Leave the computer down to the barebones with video only, run that for a while. Then add sound... then add something else, etc. I had one case with XP and a SE440BX-2 motherboard where it wasn't compatible with a specific WD 30Gig drive I had. I installed a seperate IDE card I had, and then everything worked. The system had worked under Win2k, and I suspect XP was having difficulties detecting whether the IDE channel supported ATA-100 specs(it did not, but the drive did) and would cause the harddrive to error out and disconnect itself. That took me a day to figure out, so I realize these issues can be hard.