Lockups and CPU/RAM overextension

dahamsta

I'm having a couple of problems with one of my machines. It's a Gateway Select with a 1GHz Athlon and 640MB RAM, running Win2K SP2.

Every now and then - it seems to be random - the machine locks up for a short time. Mouse pointer stops, keyboard has no effect. After a few seconds then, maybe five or even less, everything works normally again.

Another problem manifests itself when I'm using Paint Shop Pro - if I select something, the machine slows down dramatically, the bigger the selection, the worse it gets. That seems to be the only action that reproduces this.

I also get regular crashes in MSIE 5.5, but I'm used to that on Windows so it doesn't really bother me that much.

This is my third or fourth time installing Win2K now, with the same problems, so a reinstall won't fix it. And I can't really think of any event that "made it start happening".

So d'ya reckon these are related to each other? Have any idea what it could be?

Cheers in advance,
adam

JustHalf

Some programs like to hog your PC... try disabling:
* Virus scanners
* Regular scanners
* Direct/Packet CD (if you have a CD writer)

Supercell

dahamsta, some of the Gateway athlon boards don't support that much memory, also most of them need motherboard drivers installed after a reload of windows(any flavour).
If you like, send me you're serial number and i'll have a look at that system (i do remember that there was exactly this issue with some athlon motherboards and cpu combination..but not going talk about it here..yet )

dragonkin

Sounds like you've got a bad case of overflow try cleaning out the PC, uninstalling all programs that are not commomly used and go through the startup and registry entries deleating all the enties that you don't really need to have running constantly also check through hardware profiles and make sure everything is all right.

Normally I just backup .doc files etc. and reformat the drive when this sort of thing happens.

dahamsta

Thanks for the replies peeps, much appreciated. It's none of the obvious stuff though, I've tried all of that:

I don't think it's software anyway, the last two times I reinstalled I built it up gradually from me archives, and it was there from the off (although it *could* be one of the service packs). I don't run a virus scanner, never did. I have a CD burner, but obviously I didn't have any OEM software on the subsequent installs, so it's using Microsoft drivers, which *shouldn't* cause hassle, but you know yerself. (I might try taking it out though, see what happens.)

Longfield, that *could* be it, but it *shouldn't* - it's a Select 1000, which is supposed to handle up to 768 megs. Also, I have a buddy in Gateway who reckons that shouldn't be the problem. I'll surely dig the serial out later on though.

And dragonkin, I've cleared my registry and reformatted and reinstalled several times. It's Windows, that's always the first thing I do.

adam

_CreeD_

Is it a VIA chipset? If so have you installed the latest VIA 4/1 drivers, they will correct your IDE-Busmaster's and AGP?

Secondly have you tried using Task-Manager or performance monitor to track just where the bottleneck is? For a start Keep Task manager running in the background and go to work - when it gets really slow switch over and see what your CPU/Mem usage is like, and you can look at the trend graph aswell to see did it slowly creep up or was it just instant.

Gerry

I presume you have 256 + 256 + 128 in the dimm slots. If you have a 512 mb dimm in there, and the board doesn't expressly support it, it might run unreliably. Otherwise, all I can think of doing is removing all the pci cards out of the machine, (unless the video card is pci ) Then run the machine, see if it is still acting up. If the problem has gone away, add in cards until it gives trouble. Then you know what the problem is. If it runs unreliably with only the bare minimum of components, try running with just 1 stick of ram. Otherwise it could be some bios setting, or a faulty component. Kinda hard to pinpoint from here