Computer freezes after an amount of time.

[dare2poke]

I cleaned the room in the basement yesterday... it was some hardcore cleaning and I also vacuumed up my computer (outside and inside to rid the dust). However, after everything was plugged in, I found that it would freeze after an amount of time (not just normal, but safe mode also... kind of).

Here's my rig:

DFI Lanparty SLi-dr Motherboard
4 gigs of OCZ ram (3200... or something)
AMD x2 4400 (2.2ghz)
2 Hard drives, each 150 Gb
nVidia Geforce 7800GTX
... can't remember the audio card..

etc...

I'm running Windows XP Professional... I think it's SP1.

My computer worked fine before I cleaned it... I'm worried that vacuuming the inside might have damaged the hardware but I'm not sure. I inspected it and I don't see any damage to the motherboard, gpu, ram, etc... I'm at a loss on this one.

When I boot into safemode it lists all the system processes or... something like that. At the end (it stalls a little, or it's just "loading") it ends up rebooting and asks the same question (choose what mode you want to boot in...:)

EDIT:

I forgot to add that it freezes after an amount of TIME (not just after you boot into the desktop).

If I leave the computer at the log-in screen, it could still freeze there. Or, I could quickly type in my password and log-in, and it would freeze a few seconds after I login, normally while startup applications are loading (I don't have that many).

[Suspishio]

What can we say from a distance?

If I properly caught your drift, you all but admitted that your vacuuming of the PC interior may have been a bit on the rough side.

All of a sudden the PC gives trouble.

So what could have happened since the PC half performs? Did you disturb the disk cables? Try reseating them. Did you knock anything (like the disk drive)? You'd need to Ckdsk the drive in Repair mode to see if it's damaged.

Quite possibly and highest on the list of things that got knocked is your RAM. Reseat that.

That's as far as anyone here could advise, I reckon.

Keep us informed.

[DarkRubicant]

Normally if something hardware wise is damaged at least from my experience the computer wouldn't work right. It sounds like something could have gone wrong with windows therefore causing it not to work right in safe mode even. Of course I could be wrong about it being a hardware problem, follow suspishio's advice and if it's still not working right you'll probably want to reformat and reinstall and see if that resolves the problem. Hope this helps.

[dare2poke]

Well, later that day (around 7:00pm) my friend came over. I was close to deciding to just take everything apart and put it away because I was convinced that I fried some hardware (either the video card, sound card, or motherboard- the motherboard was my guess) after some research. I read that the vacuum could cause small, normally too small to be noticed by humans, static discharge due to particles of plastic rubbing against each other. On something to that extent, like I said earlier, I concluded that I fried my motherboard.

I had taken out my video card around 4:00pm to see if I could send it back in (har har) for that step-up program for EVGA, I couldn't. My friend came over at 7:00pm and wanted to see my computer. I re-inserted the card and booted it up. We tried safemode (again) and the same thing happened: Listed some system processes and then crashed and rebooted back to the options screen. Then we did boot to last known working configurations (which I had tried before with the freezing result) and miraculously, it worked. It was odd.

My computer was unplugged when he came over, so to show him I only plugged in the basic cables: mouse, keyboard, power, monitor.

I tried plugging in the ethernet cable, and it froze. I unplugged it and we booted it up again and it worked (gasp). I plugged the ehternet cable into the other slot (My motherboard has two ethernet slots) and it didn't freeze. My computer has been working fine (to my knowledge) since.

I still think I might have damaged some hardware. It's "alright" though because believe it or not, my computer is outdated... still really good, but outdated. I had considered that if I were to replace the motherboard, I'd upgrade the motherboard and processor. It's unneeded now.

There's a lesson to this: Don't vacuum your computer. (Compressed air is better)... If that seems obvious, I didn't know not to until now.

P.S. After we rebooted the computer after it's first "working" boot, it did a check disk. I'm not sure what it did, but some files were deleted etc.

[Suspishio]

Good. You prolly knocked the NIC. Anyway if it's still working, please mark this thread as SOLVED.

[pedjaaaa]

when J leave my computer for about 15-20 minutes it freezes..and before leaving it,everything is ok..J have kaspersky and several simular programmes(ccleaner,tune up..) do you know where the problem is?