PC Crashing, help appreciated

Afran

Afran

Afran

Associate
Joined
6 Oct 2008
Posts
757
Hey,

I have no idea what is causing my PC to crash, it started a few months ago and thus far haven't bothered to do anything about it, want to now though.

I don't get a BSOD and nothing appears in the event viewer, my computer just hangs and I am forced to restart it. This tends to happen after it's been in use for a while, though at times I've barely had it on for 10 minutes and it has happened, and thusfar won't happen again for a good few hours though I can't say that for certain as there's no actual pattern to it.

I think we can rule out overheating, I've regularly checked the temperatures and they've been absolutely fine and I have good cooling.

The bundle was originally overclocked by overclockers themselves however I've ran at stock settings for a long time, even before the problem started to occur so I don't think that's relative either.

So far I've ran chkdsk, memtest, booted with a clean start up and have ran ATI Tool for several hours over a couple of days to rule out artifacting, no issues there.


Win XP SP 3
Gigabyte H55M-UD2H
Intel Core i3 530 @ 2.93GHz
Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 896MB
OCZ 600w ATX2 PSU
4GB DDR 3 RAM
Creative X-Fi 7.1 Sound Card

Thanks for any useful input :)
 
Last edited:
My first idea was overheating, but you ruled it out immediately. I am kind of out of ideas, but I would advise you to check for spyware/viruses.

Can it be from the power supply, not being able to take the load? Does it crash when you start/use a CPU demanding program?
 
No malware/spyware/viruses on the system and no error report for it either, I've not tried 1 ram stick at a time not sure what that would test that memtest didn't already? I suppose it could be the power supply but I'm not too clued up on that, did use the system for about a year before it started to occur and after a reset it's fine again, this can happen 3 times in a day or once in a month...

and I'm not sure what kind of program you'd mean by CPU demanding, I'm mostly playing on Rift :)
 
I had the same problem for ages (same symptoms) until i decided to fix it.
I had ran mem tests, but nothing showed up, until i ran a test at a later date that said there WAS errors.
I brought 2gb mem from OCuk and RMA'ed my current ram... all problems fixed!! (and i now have 6gb of ram as appose to 4gb :) )

If you have any spare ram i would try this or try with only 1 stick at a timer as suggested and see if this helps (of course it could be both/all sticks that are faulty so you may still get the problem with only 1 stick in.... I did, both mine were faulty)
 
I suppose I'll have to give that a go, could be hard though since using just 1gb of ram is going to make Rift almost unplayable I think, and possibly for quite a long time given this crash may not occur for the next four weeks =\

Anything else that it could be?
 
Can you remember what was changed from 2 months ago when this started? Surely if it's memory related you would start getting memory pop up boxes when exiting applications and such? and usually creates BSOD's.
 
I loaded up the OCUK pre-clocked settings some time back and had frequent crashes hence I'm running at stock now (2.93GHz) but the crashes were different, don't know what "Vcore volts" are but that I assume would also go to default settings when loading the default profile?
 
Yes - default should use the standard Vcore.
Hmmmmm. Deffo not heat, not Ram or HDD. Does it always crash in the one application or randomly ? (to rule out a software issue.)
This only leaves PSU, Windows or GPu as possble causes. It's probably time to start swapping out components one at a time.
 
Take the sound card out... In my experience the creative ones are not great and caused a lot of random lock ups for me. Unfortunately they'd already knackered the OS to the point that a re-install was needed.
 
Hmm, any more information on that? Never heard of Creative sound cards causing PC crashes, atleast not without producing some kind of error or something relative in event viewer.

Phage, is there a way I can check the vcore is set to what it should be for my system to ensure that theory is ruled out?

As for swapping parts out one at a time I don't have any alternatives and no one to borrow a spare part off :s awkward
 
It's already running at stock settings Leeroy :)

I did actually post my systems specs wrongly though and have edited them into the original post...
 
No luck yet :( Don't think it's the BIOS settings as I've tried "Default optimized settings" & "Fail safe default settings" since making this thread and still getting the crashes. Hate this :p
 
For Windows XP would that be Control Panel > Power Options > Turn off hard disks [Never] ? If so, that's already set. Still getting these crashes :(
 
Well since you've run memtest, then your next port of call is the Hard Drive.

Firstly, identify the manufacturers of your hard drive(s). If this information isn’t available to you in the BIOS or start-up screen then you’ll have to open the case and find out. All drives are labelled with the manufacturer, part number and serial number. You may need this information later if the drive is under warranty.

Visit the manufactures website for diagnostics tools. Most of these tools are available on live CD or DVDs, which means they boot straight from the disk, so hard drive or windows isn’t required. The diagnostics tool will scan your hard drive and report errors. If any errors are reported, then the hard drive will be faulty. Replace hard drive.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom