Computer stalling, freezing & beeping - help!

Zascar

I built a pc a few months ago, basic specs but decent enough (AMD Athlon II X3, ASRock M3A770DE, Club 3D HD5450 1024MB, Xigmatek Asgard, ATX, Super-Flower SF500P12P 500W, 4GB-KIT Mushkin Silverline Stiletto) worked fine for ages but occasionally develops some weird odd problems.

It seems to just freeze and lock up on occasion. Sometimes when I restart it does not get past the black screen with the flashing white line. I had these problems a while back, was trying everything, eventually I took out one 2gb stick and they seemed to go away. Now I have the same problem again. It's driving me nuts. Its randomly freezing & locking up - might last 10 seconds, might never come back. The odd time when it locks I get this solid long beep - might last 30 seconds and then its ok again. It has done that a few times this weekend.

I have only just reinstalled XP Pro so it can't really be a software issue. I had to reinstall twice as the first time it was crashing every time I went into control panel and explorer crashed all the time also.

So, any idea how I can work out what part might be giving these issues??
Thanks

ED E

Did you test the rig after you built it Zascar? Sounds like she isnt the most stable of boxes.

Easiest and thus first thing to check is heat. Run something like Speccy and see what temps its ticking over at, and under load(try Prime95 to stress it). Report them back here.

Next on my list would be your ram, run a memtest and see if it finds anything, could be a dud stick. Also on this, reseat your sticks, a badly seated stick can cause problems.

It could be the 5450, but realistically I dont think thats likely. That said, did you install 11.8 drivers the other day? In that case, roll them back first of all and see if that solves it. Still heat test though.

Zascar

Thanks Lethal. I've never used any of those before but I gave them a go.
This is my speccy:



I'm not sure if that's ok or not. Anything else in there I should be looking at?

I reseated the memory sticks. I'm going to run memtest now when I'm out. It only tests 1372mb at a time so you need to run 3 simultaneously. I'll report back
Cheers for the help!

unkel

Temps don't seem to be the problem. My next suggestion was going to be memtest - let us know how you get on

After that, run some tests on the hard disk your OS is installed on. And then try another graphics driver

Zascar

Thanks. I did a memtest over the weekend and zero errors reported. It's actually been absolutely fine since I reseated the ram - so maybe that could be it. However, at one stage over the weekend I was playing some large (1-2gb) mp4 files from a HD video camera and the graphics went a bit nuts, displaying it all grainey and broken - so maybe I should try reseating the graphics card too.

I've lost the dam cd with the graphics card drivers and it was tricky to find the right ones online for some reason. After I did the clean install on Friday, I downloaded a little file from the manufacturer which auto detects your graphics card and then downloads the correct drivers for it. Strangely enough as soon as it was finished and I restarted, it was 640x480 and 16 colours, and I was unable to change it. I had to uninstall and restart. If anyone can point me to the correct ones I'd appreciate it.

I do want to do a full check on the hard disks - can you recommend a good program to do this?

Thanks for all the help - very much appreciated!
Z

unkel

Zascar wrote: »

If anyone can point me to the correct ones I'd appreciate it.

Latest Catalyst driver for XP

But before you install, get rid of any leftovers from other drivers with this

Zascar wrote: »

I do want to do a full check on the hard disks - can you recommend a good program to do this?

My favourite way of checking the hard disk with the OS on it is to independently boot off a boot CD and then run your utility. I use Hiren's boot CD and run it in mini windows XP mode. Then I use the utility HD Tune that comes with the boot CD