Soldato
Hi all,
Been a long time since I loast posted and I'm back needing some technical help.
My PC (spec in sig) has been working (almost) flawlessly for the last 3 years, but 2 nights ago developed a severe condition of lockupitis.
The symptoms are: after not very many minutes of operation an application (be it game, web browsing, MSWord, whatever) will lock up, followed seconds later by all applications locking up, followed a few more seconds later by the PC completely locking up. No BSOD. No errors.
The only way to rectify the issue is reset / cold boot, but then the problem repeats in just a few minutes.
The problem first manifested itself very late at night on Tuesday when I was about to quit my favourite game and the PC locked up. I thought 'sod it', switched it off an went to bed thinking nothing of it (it'll be fine after a reboot tomorrow!).
It is obviously making the PC unusable. I'm in the process of copying over all my iTunes library, game backups, data etc (a few minutes at a time) to my NAS drive.
In the meantime I'm trying to fix the problem.
My first thought was 'bad RAM', so I've run memtest86, but I've run it over and over and it's not reporting any errors, so I'm assuming the RAM is not the issue now.
My second thought was 'virus'. Clearly I couldn't run a virus scan under normal circumstances (the PC doesn't stay working long enough) so I booted into safe-mode (I'm using WinXP-SP3) and ran a virus scan. Twice (to be safe). No problems reported.
Then it dawned on me; the PC didn't crash in safe-mofe. Hmmm...driver issue?
I'm dubious because this problem came out of the blue really, more like a hardware failure than a piece of software suddenly going **** up, but I'm becoming more convinced (and hopeful) that it's not a hardware fault with the PC working fine in safe-mode.
So far, I have tried removing all the nVidia drivers in safe-mode, but the PC isn't playing ball - it seems to hang forever, then when I Ctrl-Alt-Del and close the nVidia driver removal and restart it all the drivers show as 'uninstall in progress'. I can't get past this point.
I still have to remove drivers for sound card etc, which I'll try tonight.
So far, I haven't tried removing any hardware one piece at a time and seeing if this fixes the crashing problem. Maybe I'll try this tonight as well.
Now, before I get totally fed up with it and reformat the whole PC and do a fresh install, can anyone shed any light on my problem?
Thanks in advance for any helpful suggestions offered.
Hav
Been a long time since I loast posted and I'm back needing some technical help.
My PC (spec in sig) has been working (almost) flawlessly for the last 3 years, but 2 nights ago developed a severe condition of lockupitis.
The symptoms are: after not very many minutes of operation an application (be it game, web browsing, MSWord, whatever) will lock up, followed seconds later by all applications locking up, followed a few more seconds later by the PC completely locking up. No BSOD. No errors.
The only way to rectify the issue is reset / cold boot, but then the problem repeats in just a few minutes.
The problem first manifested itself very late at night on Tuesday when I was about to quit my favourite game and the PC locked up. I thought 'sod it', switched it off an went to bed thinking nothing of it (it'll be fine after a reboot tomorrow!).
It is obviously making the PC unusable. I'm in the process of copying over all my iTunes library, game backups, data etc (a few minutes at a time) to my NAS drive.
In the meantime I'm trying to fix the problem.
My first thought was 'bad RAM', so I've run memtest86, but I've run it over and over and it's not reporting any errors, so I'm assuming the RAM is not the issue now.
My second thought was 'virus'. Clearly I couldn't run a virus scan under normal circumstances (the PC doesn't stay working long enough) so I booted into safe-mode (I'm using WinXP-SP3) and ran a virus scan. Twice (to be safe). No problems reported.
Then it dawned on me; the PC didn't crash in safe-mofe. Hmmm...driver issue?
I'm dubious because this problem came out of the blue really, more like a hardware failure than a piece of software suddenly going **** up, but I'm becoming more convinced (and hopeful) that it's not a hardware fault with the PC working fine in safe-mode.
So far, I have tried removing all the nVidia drivers in safe-mode, but the PC isn't playing ball - it seems to hang forever, then when I Ctrl-Alt-Del and close the nVidia driver removal and restart it all the drivers show as 'uninstall in progress'. I can't get past this point.
I still have to remove drivers for sound card etc, which I'll try tonight.
So far, I haven't tried removing any hardware one piece at a time and seeing if this fixes the crashing problem. Maybe I'll try this tonight as well.
Now, before I get totally fed up with it and reformat the whole PC and do a fresh install, can anyone shed any light on my problem?
Thanks in advance for any helpful suggestions offered.
Hav
