Dear intelligent people,

My pc has been freezing for the past 6 months and is driving me nuts. It happens apparently at random when streaming video, downloading, installing software etc. when it happens the screen freezes with a loud click over the speakers which sometimes repeats like a jumping record (for those who remember that kind of thing),the mouse is inoperable I have to power down to get it going again. sometimes it will freeze straight away after ree-boot or during reboot. This normally only happens after I have been using the machine for over an hour and never appears to happen after a short period of usage.
My original machine was built privately in 2001 but has been upgraded twice since, the last time being July 09, improvong the power source adding more memory and RAM and changing from xp to xp performance edition. I thought this might cure it, alas no, the issue is still there.
I have fully scanned the computer with ESET, no problems found and was wondering if there was anything else I could do short of lobbing the lott off the Forth Road Bridge!

SPEC: AMD Athlon (tm)xp2000+ , 1.67Ghz , 3GB RAM, Windows XP Pro performance edition.

Any suggestions would be very gratefully received.

Thanks

J

Welcome to D-A-L.

You appear to have a sufficient amount of RAM. To start, make sure the ventilation aspects (fans/heatsinks etc) are free of dust etc.

Then I would reseat the memory modules, and then run a thorough check on the machines memory and the hard disk. You may have a bad sector or two in the area of the swapfile.

Download and run MemTest86+.
Memtest86+ - Advanced Memory Diagnostic Tool

Use the appropriate downloaded file to create either a floppy bootdisk or a bootable CD. For a floppy, unzip the files to an empty directory and (with a floppy in your drive) run the install.bat file. When complete, you won't see any files on the floppy, but they are there. Just boot the machine with this floppy and run it as long as you can afford to. If there are errors, run it on one memory module at a time to narrow down the possibilities. (ie; Remove all but one module.) You may have to set your bios boot device sequence to boot from the floppy (or CDROM) drive first.

Thanks for the swift reply, needless to say I have not been very 'hands on' with my machine in the past but I'll have alook at your instructions and give it a bash.

Thanks again.

Jimmy.