Advice on Computer freezing up!

[Samantha Wildhound]

can be caused by many things,

it does sound like an overheating issue though, even if the ambient air temp outside the case is cool, inside can still be another story, as the gpu and cpu, and hard drive put out alot of heat (most cpus have the equivalent heat output of a 100 watt light bulb, and newer vid cards can run as hot as the cpu requiring their own heatsink/fan combos)

most new comps have temp monitoring sensors onboard, and can be accessed via the BIOS on startup,
and with many free ware programs while running windows (msi boards can download cooler xp etc) so id check the temps first.

i had to recently clean my laptops fan as i was experiencing slow downs and the cpu was running around 50 celsius at idle. just take the side off when your comp is off and unplugged, and take a look at the fan/s. theres no real risk of being shocked, as the board itself never carries high voltage or amps (the POWER supply does, but it is inclosed, and the connectors are covered via plastic plugs ) you do have to be careful about static charges, so at the very least ground yourself by touching a bare metal part of the computer case to discharge any static etc) the fans usually are screwed or clipped on the case/heatsink, just do not remove the heatsink itself, just the fan if needed to clean it/lubricate it a bit.

as for ram, what you have should be sufficient for xp, it may be failing though. memtest is a decent bit of freeware that can check for problems with ram.

You can check your video card by right clicking on the desktop, click settings, as well as in the control panel with system>device manager>display adaptors, they are listed there, and updated drivers can be found on the parent sites (nvidia, ati/amd, intel etc)

defrag of course, run a decent registry/temp file cleaner, tuneup utilities 2008 is free for 30 days, ccleaner is nice and free, and of course make sure you have no spyware/virus infections, as they can wreak havoc as well (spybot and ad aware are decent and free for spyware, and avg has a decent free virus scanner)


so basically it can be anything lol, but doesnt hurt to eliminate the most common causes right off the bat, drivers (motherboard/sound/video etc can cause lockups, heat can, failing hard drive, just alot can go wrong in a pc and its best to just check off things one by one till you get it solved)

might also wanna try running it in safe mode, and seeing how long you can go without a lockup, as it might be a start up program/driver or service thats not playing nice.