XP machine erractic system freeze at boot up. any advice welcome

System:

tiny brand tower pc/ cd writer/ XP Pro/ SP2/ X86 based pc/ X86 family 15 model 1 stepping 2 genuine intel ~1496 Mhz/ total physical memory 768Mb/ NVidia TNT2 model64/model64 Pro, Nvidia compatible 32MB

Further info:

Haupage win tv card/ usb data link cable other xp machine for file transfer/ firewire pci card, not connected to any device/ monitor, recently added 19" hansol/ this machine has worked liked a rocket for the last two years, it came from a very reliable source but could be up to 6/7 years old/ good condition/ cpu fins hoovered today, well overdue/ psu hoovered (but unneeded) today/ used daily for avi files and 'lara croft' early tomb raider games and left on 12/24 daily over the last 12 months/ never connected to the internet, however it does accept a large amount of .avi and .cbr files which originate from the web.

Symptoms:

on boot up today, within a moment, the system just freezes up completely, no mouse, no alt+F4 no power switch off and shut down, no nothing, only a reset helps.

This produced the white and black bios option screen for choosing among safe and normal and last know boot up options.

several attempts to go in to safe mode produced a freeze at one particular driver and an escape option to ignore it. (sorry it went by too quickly to grab its name) an esc to ignore said driver produced nothing, the machine just hung up for another reset.

Further attempts using a boot disk in the a: drive produced a half a boot to the point where pci devices are detected, the the system froze.... reset again

further attempts produced similar results with one boot being ok and then half way through a file transfer over the usb data link cable, system freeze, reset again

another boot produced 20 minutes of avi file play time then a freeze.

the last reboot produced a good boot to desk top and now, some 15 mins later, system freeze.


Action taken so far:

cover off, finger on passive graphic card cooling fins = hot
removed cpu fan and hoovered out the cpu fins, most definately overdue, *blush*

took said graphics card to man in nice little shop:
"I suspect the cpu may need silicone to the heatsink, i will test your graphics card (for nothing) yes they do get very hot"

My assumption:

the graphics card is dying.

I would welcome your suggestions and comments to help me sort this out. Its bugging the nuts off me :cry

 

Have you tried last known good configuration that worked mode yet? That could help. If you have a windows xp disc you can do a repair install. That might clear it up!

 

I did try, but it froze up during trying, I will attempt to do an XP repair later this evening.

Thank you for your time.

 

I have re installed XP Pro after a reformat of the c:

The same problem exists, reasonably stable boot up but unpredictable running.
One time ok until some avi was FF through VLC player
one time was ok until wmp skipped thro an avi file
today it froze reading .cbr files

the machine is used for mainly graphics applications

the pc was stable during the entire 40 minute XP install, rebooting each time during the process with out problem.
3 mins later:
It just rebooted to a frozen desktop = reset *puzzled look*

how odd.

 

If you open up task manager and go to the performance tab, what % is your cpu and page file usage running at?

 

CPU useage = 0%

PF useage = 59.0Mb

the cpu usage shot to 27% for a split second

it froze again = reset

came back to desktop frozen = reset

came back to 61.2 - 60.9Mb PF usage this time, CPU peaked at 25% briefly, then cpu usage when 0% / 11% / 35% /0%

it also froze during the SP2 re install, just now after XP install, am now trying to re install SP2

 

SP2 installed, and a defrag, now running an avi file..................

damn: stopped the avi after about two minutes and tried to install 'real alternative' pc froze = reset

installed 'real alternative' and so far, happily skipping thro a .rm file

 

please, I am not trying to bump, I am just writing progress with my issue )

all seems very stable now, (fingers crossed) several packages re installed.
nothing scary yet daemon manager works for the lara croft iso files, movies play.

perhaps it was a software issue after all, in which case, sorry for posting in hardware.

i earlier assumed because of a hotter than expected graphics card and one shed load of blocked fins, it was a hardware issue.......

watch this space.

 

the following morning,

boot up, all seems ok. machine freezes during file transfer, reset and boot up, playing avi files, freezes randomly.... so back to symptoms of yesterday... randomly freezing.

so, i think it is hardware related, but unsure where to go next.........

 

i have put a Radeon 7000 in the computer and it does seem more stable, i have the resolution up at 1280 x 1024 and flipping thro avi files.

earlier i used the original card in high resolution but it only played for 10 minutes and froze up, reducing the resolution seemed to help, so now i am more inclinded to think it is a graphic card problem, however:

i took the nvidia card that i suspected and put it in this internet machine i am using now. altho the image is pretty rubbish and the cards cooling fins feel real hot ( hotter than the radeon playing avi files) the nvidia has not frozen up the internet machine.

so any advice or ideas you may have would be welcome.

 

Re: XP erractic system freeze at boot up. I think i solved it !

SUNDAY

I think I have found the issue:

The machine ran avi files in full screen all day yesterday, in several different screen resulotions... all was fine.
Today on boot up it began freezing just like the other day.

I have been running 'mem test'' from a floppy and over 60 3Mb errors came up, so i have removed the 3 slabs of memory and am now testing each slab seperately to see which slab is producing the errors.

Looks like a memory fault! ( hope this helps others one day with similar issues)

 

Glad to hear you fixed it! Sorry I hadn't got back with you, it was just a really busy weekend.

 

no problems, Im almost sure its the memory slabs, all three 256 slabs show a complete fail on test 5 of mem test.

Later this week i will put some other memory in and try that, but today i am full of cold, so the computer can wait a day or two