PC Freezing, Crashing, Refusing to boot...help please?

[Jukesy]

Hi guys/gals,

Don't know if anyone here can shed some light on the following problem (but im sure you can).

Looking at a friends retail pc (Socket 775 Pentium 4)and sometimes when you turn it on it loads windows then freezes, then i would restart it only to find it wont even boot and the monitor light just stay amber and if i leave it a while then try again it may get to the gfx bios then just hang.

At first i thought it may be a CPU overheating problem so checked bios (when i could get it) and the temp of the CPU was reporting 49-53c, so i have taken that out cleaned it and the heatsink and applied new theermal paste. Restarted and managed to get into Bios first time to find it had gone down to 38c, result i thought! Only to find then on loading Windows for it to crash, i have also returned all bios settings to default. Im now thinking either a dodgy PSU or a Hard Drive issue? Maybe even a corrupt windows install?

Am i right???? Thanks

 

[Kennysevenfold]

if your struggling to get into the bios i doubt its a windows problem, are you able to boot into safe mode.?

booting up with just 1 stick of memory.? trying it with each stick on its own.?

unplugging all "extras" and trying to boot, ie dvd drives, sound cards, peripherel cards (pci, pci-e)

and do you hear any beeps at all.?

 

[Jukesy]

Hiya and thank you for replying,

This rig was retail and was working fine for at least 2/3 years before this problem arose, there are no beebs at all on startup and only sometimes will it get to the stage when i can enter safemode otherwise it will either crash or freeze...