Crash issue

hughtrimble · 8 Sep 2015 at 11:56

Freezing issue

Morning,

I've an old DELL PC at home that is rarely used, but yesterday booting it up all appeared fine. Then five minutes in it froze, and the keyboard lights went off.

Turned it off and on again. Five minutes in it froze, this time the keyboard lights stayed on.

Off and on again. No screen signal.

Off and on again. All fine, with no crash after an hour's use.

Any clues?

ExRayTed · 8 Sep 2015 at 14:55

What does event viewer show?

hughtrimble · 9 Sep 2015 at 16:23

ExRayTed said:
What does event viewer show?

I can no longer get onto the computer for long enough to check it - it just freezes after logging on.

Thank you for the suggestion though - I wasn't aware of that feature before.

ExRayTed · 9 Sep 2015 at 16:37

Can you get in via safe mode? Tap f8 on boot to access

dazza13 · 9 Sep 2015 at 16:37

Try booting up in safe mode

linktoinsanity · 9 Sep 2015 at 16:52

Could be faulty RAM or an overheating graphics card (if it's onboard, unlucky).

How old is the machine, what model is it?

hughtrimble · 18 Sep 2015 at 18:14

Thank you all for your responses. Apologies it's taken so long for me to respond.

It's a Dell Inspiron 560, with a Pentium E5400 @2.70GHz and 4GB RAM. Bought many years ago!

The event viewer showed nothing at all around the times of the crashes, aside from the power warning when I was forcing the turning off, so none the wiser on that front.

Taking your suggestions I reseated the RAM (interestingly it's four sticks of 1GB) and it's been going just fine ever since.

Thanks again.