Freezing computer

Boozebeard · 6 Jun 2010 at 16:08

My friend has a pretty old but still decent rig that will sometimes freeze during certain games. I've not seen it happen my self but I think the picture will just freeze and the sound will stutter, although one time he said he could still hear me over skype despite the whole thing haven frozen. What is this most likely to be, graphics card? He has a 7950, so it's pretty old but still performs really well on all the games he plays.

Could it be his mobo? I installed my old ram into it because he thought maybe it was that but I had to put it into slot 1 and 2 because it wouldn't detect anything in slot 3, so it seems his mobo is abit knackerd. On the subject of the memory would it be better having the ram sticks in slot 2 and 4 so it's still running dual channel or should I leave it 1 and 2?

AiiR · 6 Jun 2010 at 16:54

Might be the hdd on the way out possibly?

Mailman86 · 6 Jun 2010 at 17:37

If you can get the memory running in dual channel, it's not going to hurt so do that I say.

To fix the stuttering, before you start messing about with hardware, try updating all the drivers to the latest or last known good set (chipset, graphics, sound etc) if you haven't already. If that doesn't work, a format might be a good idea.

monkeyspunk · 6 Jun 2010 at 17:44

I had a freezing problem for ages and it turned out to be my WD150 Raptor harddrive was on its way out...

mistercrabb · 6 Jun 2010 at 17:55

Could be anything, my old USB modem used to make the same thing happen..

sjcf1 · 6 Jun 2010 at 19:38

That doesn't sound good then for me, my systems been hanging recently, going to take the HDD's out of raid and see whats going on with them.

Boozebeard · 6 Jun 2010 at 21:10

hmmm, he has one hard drive with all the programs and OS on and another one for general storage. When I was in his PC I also noticed a hard drive that was labled "backup" but wasn't even plugged in. He sort of inherited the PC so he doesn't know whats on it.

Gonna install win 7 so maybe I will suggest ditching the current OS drive and just using one or seeing whats on the "backup" drive and using that instead.

I just had to install new video drivers to get dual screen to work, as I found an old screen in his attic he is now using. So maybe he's drivers were really out of date, even though he said he updated them very recently. Will see if he gets anymore crashes using them.

PermaBanned · 6 Jun 2010 at 21:47

That's great, if you're computer's freezing then you may as well make use of it an clock the hell out of it! That must be about as effective as phase change cooling shouldn't it?