Posted by lithiumdeuteride on September 10, 19102 at 01:45:15:
here is my system:
Antec 400W power supply
Abit KG7 motherboard
512 MB of Centon PC2100 RAM
AMD 1.60 GHz Athlon XP 1900+ processor
Creative Soundblaster Audigy Gamer sound card
Abit Siluro GeForce 4 Ti4200 video card
30.0 GB IBM hard drive
40.0 GB Maxtor hard drive
Plextor 8x4x32 CD-RW drive
LG 16x DVD-ROM drive
running dual-boot Microsoft Windows XP Professional (main OS) and
Windows 2000 Professional, one per hard drive.
here is my problem:
for the past two months, ever since i upgraded my computer (new motherboard, cpu, RAM, power supply, video card, and sound card), it has been freezing at random. it's the nasty kind of freezing where there is no error message or blue screen of death, just a complete lockup of the system, and the sound card playing either static blips or the last 2000 millisecond buffer of whatever audio was last playing. the video display is unaffected, and continues to show whatever was last on the screen (though not moving, of course). mouse and keyboard are or course non-functional. it happens equally frequently in either operating system, so i do not believe it is software-related.
it never freezes before the OS loads, however, only after it loads, and sometimes only a couple minutes after it loads. it froze the day i upgraded it, perhaps an hour after i first turned it on. other than that, it runs perfectly. i have noticed a higher freeze rate when playing video, however.
FACT 1: it usually runs for about 2-5 hours before freezing when doing minimal things like internet browsing, folder browsing, text manipulation, playing an mp3, doing absolutely nothing, etc. it has, on occasion, even frozen when simply idling. this is annoying, but managable, except when i lose work on a paper i'm writing. i have, of course, learned to save every couple minutes.
FACT 2: when doing something a bit more strenuous, such as playing a 2d game like StarCraft or using a music sequencer, it will usually run for about 40 minutes before freezing.
FACT 3: when playing a DVD, mpg, asf, divx, or any other kind of high-bitrate video-ish sort of file...i'm lucky to get 5 minutes of playing time before it freezes. as you can imagine, this is horribly frustrating when trying to watch a 2-hour DVD.
here is what i've tried:
first, due to the fact that the sound card made weird noises and repeated the buffered audio when it froze, i suspected my Soundblaster Audigy was the cause. i downloaded and installed the new drivers. still froze. i read on the internet that windows XP and 2000 users were having problems with the Audigy causing computer to crash. i figured this was what happened to me. they blamed the Playcenter software bundled with the Audigy drivers. i formatted my hard drive, reinstalled windows XP, and reinstalled the Audigy with only the drivers and none of the software. it still froze. finally, i removed the card completely, software and hardware, formatted my hard drive, reinstalled sans sound card...and it still froze.
thus, the sound card could not POSSIBLY be to blame, so i suspected something in my BIOS was not right. i upgraded my BIOS, my video card's BIOS, my video card drivers, and fiddled with the motherboard BIOS settings to hell and back. enable memory hole at 15-16 MB? no luck. change AGP aperture size? not a chance. individual, manual control of IRQ settings for every device? shot down again.
now i was thinking it was the video card, because once when it froze i restarted it and it was back to the base resolution of 800x600. i don't think it's the video card anymore, though. just a week ago, my friend told me that this guy's computer was exhibiting similar symptoms to mine, and it turned out to be defective RAM.
so now i'm suspecting my stick of Centon RAM, the only part of the upgrade i actually purchased from a retail store. the irony!
if anyone has experienced similar problems that were corrected
with RAM replacement, or has any useful helpful at all, please
email me at
thanks