stuck....

[pam123]

My rig, see signature, has taken to locking up at random times and returning completly unrelated error messages.
The first ones that I thought were some sort of virus attack, event viewer annonced that the remote diagnosis had just been enabled, turned into the video driver not initializing.
I did a completely clean driver uninstall reinstall, I mean remove everything, all folders out of C, go into windows system 32, run reg cleaner, etc.
Now I'm back to windws loading at random and more random freezes and this time I'm seeing ACPI and DCOM errors in event viewer.
ACPI in enabled in bios.
I reformatted on June 2. I've run full virus scans, Device Manager reports no trouble.
Given the fact that I've had this board for 2 years I thought it might be time to replace the battery but I'm not getting any CMOS messages that suggest that might be the problem.
I reformatted in June because of the same trouble, back then I thought it was time for my 2X a year reformat. Everything was fine until Friday of last week.
I had the ATI demos just installed but removing them when I redid the drivers made no difference. I thought it might be WinMX but then I remembered that this began before I downloaded and installed it during the few hours on Monday when the comp was behaving.
I'm stuck. XP reports everything as it should be, until the next freeze.
What's going on ?

[andyms18a]

hi pam
can you try some diags with me first can you under clock your cpu set the fsb to 133 and the multyplyer to 10 all so if pos try a difrent stick of ram and report any changes to the systom
back to me

[crjdriver]

Have you run diagnostics on the ram and the hd mgf utility for the hard disk? Since it was a clean install and the problem remained I would look into a hardware problem.

[crjdriver]

I am assuming that you checked for overheating already.

[lil Jimmie]

I had an Iwill board that had the same problems and all I could find is the the ACPI Bios was not fully compliant with XP and needed a bios flash in which none was availible for that board. Run perfect if I changed the APCI HAL to a Standard PC HAL, but then you had to manually shut it down.

[pam123]

andyms,
I will try the under clock and report back but I don't have any spare ram, if necessary I will buy/borrow some on Wed.
I'll also follow up crjdriver's suggestions, I hadn't thought to check the hd.
Yes, I checked for overheating and that's not it.

[pam123]

James,
The board is about old enough for that but why, after more than half a year would it start now ?
I had the same problem you described, upgraded from 98se, but the shut down trouble was resolved by enabling ACPI in the bios some months ago.
I've just downloaded the Maxtor diagnostic and I'll start with that and begin working my way through the list to see what happens.
Since it's so random, XP won't load or, conversely, it will load and run for several hours, and etc... I expect this to take some time.

[pam123]

The hd gets a clean bill of health but it looks like it could be the memory.
When I underclocked it all was well for about an hour, then the comp froze.
Took it back up to 133 and it froze in 30 minutes.
I going to run a memory tester on it later.
Still everytime I check Event Viewer ACPI comes up.
I have it disabled at the moment and I'll see what happens.
Thanks for everyone's help.

[pam123]

Got it !
It was heat after all.
The fan on the power supply is going but it isn't gone.
So some times it works just fine, like for 5 hours straight last night to early this morning, and some time it just doesn't make it, like at 11:30 this moring when I turned it back on.
This time it barely made it to the bios screen and I checked the fan immediately, it was barely spinning.
I really liked the fact that the ps was super quiet but if it had made more noise I would have known when it was starting to fail.
Since I only checked the bios temp when it had been running for at least an hour, and got suckered by the error messages otherwise, I kept getting the normal temperature readings.
Even an Enermax will die, albeit gradually, I guess.
My local CompUSA is selling Antecs so I'll pick one up this weekend.
Thank you everyone for your help, and especially crjdriver for making me look again.