Strange Problem

Jammer

i've had a PC built for about 6months, and its waited till now to give me grief.

The mouse froze a few times last night, and then when i went to turn it back on, the monitor just kept going into "Off Mode" even when i'd turn it on and the monitor should wake up. It was about 3am so i just left it. The room was quite warm and i put it down to temps.

I turned it on this morning and the monitor woke up, got through playing half a song and it froze up again. Turned it off, back on and went to the bios to check the temps, it showed system as 29 and cpu as 45...healthy enough i thought, went to exit out of bios....but the selection hightlight wouldn't move - it had frozen even in the BIOS!

Any ideas? i dont even know where to start looking! Its a 2800+ with 256mb PC2700 memory. I havent installed anything recently. I use the PC mainly as my music player and games server!

[EDIT] System isn't overclocked [/EDIT]

Jammer

anyone?

duridian

Could be the psu. Since you have two relatively similar systems in your sig, maybe trying swapping the psu from the other one and see if it makes any difference. Another possibilty is the ram, try running memtest to check your ram.

Webmonkey

Take out all pci cards, just leave graphics, ram, hard drive and processor. Plug out cdrom/floopy also. See if it freezes then. I had a prob like this and it was once down to my Skystar DVB pci card and lately it was a TV Capture card

Jammer

No PCI slots being used! Just the AGP one. I'll try a different GFX Card!

If that fails, i guess its PSU swapping time!

Jammer

I can run memtest...i've no floppy drive. In the 3 computers in the house...theres not one with a floppy drive, is there such a program that doesnt require this?

I'll try my other stick of RAM!

tman

Originally posted by Jammer
I can run memtest...i've no floppy drive. In the 3 computers in the house...theres not one with a floppy drive, is there such a program that doesnt require this?

http://www.memtest86.com/memtest86-3.1a.iso.zip
unzip that and burn it with alcohol or nero

Jammer

When i unzipped it, there was 2 files. A security catalog and an .img....alcohol didnt recognise it! done have nero!

tman

you only have to unzip the zip file, not the iso file.

was positive you could burn that file from alcohol... my "version" is shagged though, so i can't test it.

Jammer

i unzip the file and theres a folder "BOOT" with the two files in it. Do i jus burn the whole folder to a CD?

Mutant_Fruit

in alcohol go to the image burning wizard, then click on Browse.
Here what you have to do is click on the drop down box, and choose "All Files". Then slecet the .img file and burn as normal. It should work fine, but use an RW if you can.

Jammer

Wouldn't work. RMPS error or something to that effect

tman

change the data type to normal cd (this option is in the lower left corner of the window that comes up after you click image burning wizard)

Jammer

it burned ok..or so alcohol says.

I rebooted, had my CD-ROM as 1st device and....nothing!