Strange Freezing Problem!

[Mike Hawthorne]

Hi

This is a problem that I have been having for a long time and since it’s not that big a bother I kept putting off posting this.

When I run applications that take a long time, such as my AVG virus scan or Spybot eventually the graphics become corrupted and the computer grinds to a halt.

The mouse is still active, but some of the windows have missing type or other elements and nothing is clickable. Even Task Manager will not open. The only out is to shut down the computer and start over.

The computer runs fine on normal applications; this doesn’t happen running memory intensive games, like Lord of the Rings Online or Oblivion.

My regular applications such as Adobe Photoshop CS2, InDesign CS2 and Illustrator CS3 all run fine even handling really big files.

My computer is a Dell XPS desktop, running Windows XP Media Center Addition, 3 GHz dual core, 2 gig of ram, Nvidia 7800 GTS video card with 256 MB of memory and a Soundblaster Audigy sound card. I have two internal HDs and 2 external HDs. The internal drives are in normal master slave config. The external drives are not turned on unless I am backing up data.

Every driver and all the Windows updates are current.
My hard drives are defragged, and I use Registry Cure regularly to get rid of errors.

Does anyone have any idea why this happens and what I can do about it?

Mike

[Force Flow]

It might be a good idea to keep an eye on the temps. Speedfan seems to be fairly accurate.

[Mike Hawthorne]

Hi

A little more info.

Today I had just opened Photoshop when my nephew came over and I left the computer sitting for a long time doing nothing. No file was open in Photoshop.

When I came back the computer was in the same condition.
The display was corrupted, type was missing from the dialog boxes and I couldn't open anything. Task Manager would open but with no text in the windows, though the mouse was active.

This problem may be more related to long periods of mouse inactivity then what the computer is doing. I realize now that the common factor between all the times, is that there has been no mouse activity for a sustained period of time. Making a Ghost backup, running a virus scan, and running spybot.

Does this make and sense?

I'll check out the temp thing.

Mike

[Force Flow]

Mouse inactivity doesn't amount to anything. All three things you described take up a lot of system resources to run.

So, there could be a couple of things:
1) Your hardware is getting too hot. Solution: Your fans and heatsinks may need a cleaning, something might be blocking air flow, or you may need to replace some fans.
2) Faulty RAM. Run Memtest86 (this can be found on the UBCD) on each stick individually, and if they pass, put them back in together and run the test. If those pass, that isn't your problem.
3) Faulty video card. This is usually easily apparent when trying to play 3D games. The video display "messes up".
4) Drive corruption. Since all of those tasks rely heavily on drive activity, there's the possibility of data corruption or bad sectors on the drive. Run checkdisk by going to start > run and type cmd. enter this at the prompt (if it asks to run at startup, say yes): chkdsk c: /f /r

That's about all I can think of off the top of my head without some more info. It would be helpful too if you listed your hardware specs.