My XP box just freezes every day!

Hi Peborgh,
Have you checked event viewer for the time it freezes?

Without any more specific info, here are some causes for freezes:

- overheating cpu
- overheating video card
- faulty PCI card (especially network cards)
- bad RAM
- faulty power or inadequate power supply
- faulty motherboard

Some more information on when it happens would help, as well as a listing of manufacturer and model of motherboard, video card, type and size of hard drives and free space, and what is typically running, including startup programs.

Otherwise, you will have to strip it down and try to isolate where the problem is.

Leave the side panel of the case off.

Do what you normally do and see if it freezes. If it doesnt its a heat issue.

Come back with the results of your testing! =)

5 year old celeron with 128MbB memory. This is kind of old technology for WinXP.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/evaluation/sysreqs.mspx

You system is fine for XP. It will only be slow. it shouldnt be freezing

I think 128MB is inadequate.  My XP system starts up using 160MB, and goes up from there.  256MB is the minimum I would recommend, and 512MB is desirable.

Callandor,

OK so it may be running out something memory-related. Event viewer shows nothing untoward.

Any ideas before I go buy more memory?

thanks,

peter

I think everybody knows that MS system requirements are vastly unrealistic.

64 meg is all that is "REQUIRED" for XP. Believe it or not!!

Does it freeze while you use it or when it's inactive? Check the power settings... make sure the hard drive is set to spin down : NEVER... Need more details as to the circumstance of it freezing...

128MB memory will be fine as long as it's a reliable stick... you're not gonna be getting any kills in DOOM3, but you should be able to browse your www.tinyasiangirlsinleotards.com all day long.  

My motto: NEVER BUY PARTS UNLESS IT IS A 100% FIX... (or you can sell them to your neighbors at 150%)

Might i suggest that you check your Hard drive( or one of your hard drives)

I have a machine do exactly the same thing with me recently, the problem was that one of the hard drives were failing and it would "stop" while windows was going.. so windows froze.

Try swapping RAM from another PC and see what happens.
JB

I am overwhelmed by the amount of response from you guys!

News bulletin!

Nothing wrong with memory as far as the memory test can find out.

My D: drive, however, is failing according to the diagnostics. Could this bring down Windows when this drive is not in use as far as I can tell? All the important bits including WinXP lives on the C: drive.

Thanks,

Peter

If it's connected and the electronics is failing, yes, it can cause Windows to crash or hang.  Pull it out and see if the problems persist.

Heheh Score!

A Hard Disk failure will result on the system freezing completely and the HArd Disk light coming on permanently. Given enuf time it might resolve to a blue screen saying that Windows was unable to write to disk or something similar. This shud usually not crash your system unless ur using either the Indexing service or the Microsoft Office component that monitors disks for Office doscuments. Turning that off shud help to see if the computer freezes less often. Just for a further check change your Hard Disk cable and then try running the disgnostics again. You might see something more interesting.

Dan

i had a problem with memory on my old machine - i had plenty of it, it was new and it worked.
took me a while to solve but i now live by RTFM - i had bought memory with unsupported configuration of chips (and I thought all PC133 DIMMS were the same)

after replacing with supported memory, everything was fine :-)

I don't understand why my comment wasn't accepted? I was the one who suggested you test the hardware and gave you the links.  Diane posted to check the hd's without any supportive links. Why didn't I get the accept? Did I leave something out?

DoTheDEW335 ,

You are perfectly correct. I have revised the scoring. Apologies.
Your links will be useful in the future too.

Thanks for the revise, but I still don't get why Diane gets an accept or anything for that matter since she just repeated the same thing that I did.

The matter is closed.

I understand that, I just was looking for an explanation of why a duplicate comment gets the accept. Did I miss something in mine?

I hope this does close the matter.

Diane258, apologies for messing you around. Your answer is the one that finally persuaded me after others' comments.

DoTheDEW335, thank you for your help. The links will be useful in future when similar situations arise, as they did here.

I value EE, it has generally been very useful to my work.

Thank you Peborgh, I just wanted to know if I missed anything and thats why I didn't get the accept. I love helping people out and have never seen this happen.

No, your contribution was useful not only for the present but also had wider application.

No hard feelings on either side I trust.