Random Crashes

[HolyDemon]

Hi, the last few days I have been having random crashes with my PC. First I thought it might have been my cooling but increasing the speed of my fans hasn't helped a thing plus my BIOS says that my CPU is only at 45 - 50 degrees Celcius, which shouldn't be too bad.

Here are my system specs:

Windows XP Professional SP2
MSI K7N2 Delta-L Motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (Barton)
1024 RAM (Dual channel) from Kingston
ASUS nVidia Geforce 7600 GS 256RAM
Antec Smartpower 2.0 500W PSU

Anyone's help would be greatly appreciated.

-HolyDemon

[Tunga]

Can you define "crashes" in more detail for us? What exactly happens.

[HolyDemon]

Of course.

My computer just completely freezes, nothing happens, can't move my mouse anymore and my num/scroll/caps lock buttons don't work either. (The lights stay on/off whatever they were before the freeze.)

[Kalos]

It doesn't sound like it's heat related then.

Can you check the PSU had it's lead plugged into the graphics card (on some of the 7600's, this was necessary).

Also, will this freeze in any perticular situations, such as playing WoW, or some other game, or is it always with something common, like being at the desktop screen?

Such lockups are pretty rare, usually graphics card related, but I hesitated to shout the blame to be upon it without further questioning.

[HolyDemon]

It doesn't sound like it's heat related then.

Can you check the PSU had it's lead plugged into the graphics card (on some of the 7600's, this was necessary).

Also, will this freeze in any perticular situations, such as playing WoW, or some other game, or is it always with something common, like being at the desktop screen?

Such lockups are pretty rare, usually graphics card related, but I hesitated to shout the blame to be upon it without further questioning.

The PSU is plugged into the graphics card.

Today it once froze on Splinter Cell (I had been playing it for a couple of hours or so.) and once on Warcraft 3: TFT when I only just started a game.

Both of the games shouldn't really be a heavy load on the GPU I would think.

[Kalos]

Just out of curiousity, unplug the cable and try running Splintercell again for a while. It sounds deliberately stupid, but if there is any change we'll have pinned the problem down to either the PSU or the graphics card. If there's no change, it's unlikely to be the PSU acting up.

[HolyDemon]

Trying that now, if that's the problem I sure am unlucky with PSUs lately. :(

Think I'll start saving up for a complete new system.

[Tunga]

Yeah this could be an unstable power supply to the graphics card as Kalos is suggesting. It's also worth making sure you have the latest drivers for everything (this goes for graphics mostly but check sound and anything else you can think of while you're at it).

It could also in theory be hard drive or RAM related, these kinds of problems can be the worst to troubleshoot because the PC doesn't offer any clues since there's no error message :/ .

[HolyDemon]

Seems to work when I unplug the PSU from the Graphics Card.. sigh.. that's the 2nd PSU that won't work properly with it and this time I had even bought a more expensive one.

I'm not gonna bother with this piece of crap anymore, the graphics card is just going to have to live without the PSU plugged into it.

Time to save up for a new PC.

Thanks for the help, guys.

[amgyn]

this was happening to my old computer... my screen would just freeze.. only a hard reboot would fix it..

turns out my memory was dying slowly :) -- so i built a new computer :P

if its video card related its usually accompanied by some screen tearing and artifacts appearing.