Computer Lock Ups

[Reaps]

ok, well recently, my computer started to lock up. ok well here's what happened, one day last week or so, it locked up, couldn't move the mouse, nothing, the only option was to do a manual restart. so i thought nothing of it, it was a little hot in my room and i checked the temps and they were a little high, so i upped the fan speed. everything was fine after that, until 2 days ago, it happened again, and then again, and ended up happening 3 times. so i tried a bunch of different stuff, such as scandisk, system restore, etc. and that didn't fix it, so i figured it must have been a windows problem, so i reformatted, i didn't have anything to lose really anyway. and everything was fine, until about 2 minutes ago, it happened again, and it's starting to scare me, because i'm hoping it's not a hardware issue. if anyone has any suggestion please let me know.

specs:
ASUS P4P8X mother board
Intel P4 2.0 Ghz cpu (OC'ed to 2.67 1.6v vcore)
Corsair 1024 mb dual channel DDR memory
nVidia GeForce FX 5900 ultra 256mb DDR

there might be a chance that my cpu is finally dyeing, i have had it OC'ed to 2.67 for about 6 months, with no problems. But it could be ready to just poof and die.

[Cricket]

Northwoods don't like to have the vcore raised by much. Go too high and you get the "Northwood sudden death syndrome".

Have you tried clocking it back to stock speeds? That's the first thing to do when troubleshooting an overclocked system.

Cricket

[ktkendall]

Did you clock it back down to default speed and see if that helps??

[Reaps]

well, i just did, and that was b4 i read this, and windows booted up, and i went to launch mozilla and it just locked up again, i really think that it's my cpu, because if it were the graphics card, the image would be distorted in some way, i know this because the first time i bought this graphics card, it had been shorted out. i eventually got a new one with an RMA. and i'm pretty sure it can't be the memory, because it's almost brand new, i've only had it for about 4 months, and i've done extensive tests on it. I would already have a new cpu, but the thing is, i keep hearing about these new cpu's coming out sometime during x-mas from intel, and i havent been able to find any info on them. so if anyone could give me some info on those too, that way i would know if i want one, because if it turnes out that i'm not gunna get one, then i'm just gunna go and get the cpu that i was going to get, a prescott p4 3.06GHz.

I'll try these default settings for awhile, and if it happens again, you'll know it when i come and yell about it on here . If anyone has any other suggestions then please let me know, i need to fix this

[Reaps]

ok, well it just happened again. so now i'm just starting to get pissed off. If anyone has any ideas please let me know

[Mesaeus]

Hmmmm, a hard lock usually isn't a good sign. I had a mainboard once that would lock up as soon as the room temp reached 29 degrees, while the processor was relatively cool. Took me quite a while to figure that one out because I kept suspecting the CPU. Anyways, the best way to diagnose something like this is

1) Strip down to the minimum config (1 hard drive, video card, memory, cpu and mainboard, nothing else) and see if it still happens. Try using test programs like memtest86+ for memory (unlikely, but still worth testing to be sure) and Prime95 which is excellent for thoroughly checking a CPU.

2) If 1) doesn't help, try switching out parts in this order : memory, hard disk, cpu, mainboard, PSU. If the problem goes away you then have a suspect. Try borrowing parts from a friend if you don't have some, because this is the only good way I know to solve mysterious crashes.

[Reaps]

ya, that's the problem, i can't switch out any parts, i have only this one computer, and i have no friends who will let me use theirs . i know it's not the memory, because i've used memtest before, last month actually. and i was running prime95, but something happened and when i came in, the comp was just turned off i'm actually really thinking it's the hard drive tho, but like i said, i don't have anyway to tell. and i tried a diagnostic utillity from samsung which is the HD manufacturer, but it said it couldn't detect my hard drive

o why does this kinda stuff happen to me, grrrrrr

[Markoman01027]

Memory test software aren't very accurate(atleast I think so)...you won't really know if it's the memory unless you test the system with 1 stick of RAM that you KNOW works

[ktkendall]

You said you increased the fan speed and it helped for awhile, could it be a heat or fan problem???

[Reaps]

no, the cpu and mother board have both been at around 33-36 C since i turned up the fan speed. another thing that could have something to do with it is the sound drivers, i started having these problems after i installed a new sound blaster audigy card. i'm gunna try uninstalling it. see if that helps

[Reaps]

ok well i was talkin to a friend of mine, and he said he thought it was most likely the memory, so i was like, ok well atleast that's the one thing i can swap out because i still had the old 512 stick that i had from awhile back. So i swapped out the memory, and i'm pretty sure that's what it was. After i installed the old memory, the system booted 15 seconds faster, and all of my programs seem to be running just fine. We'll see how it hold up for the rest of the day