Slightly odd but not deadly computer issues

[spiritofice]

I've had this problem since I got my PC, but its not bad enough to warrant me starting to take stuff back. However, Im wanting to know what is going wrong.

Basically, my computer freezes while loading quite often. It doesnt freeze at one specific point, but varies between the screen which allows you to enter setup, the windows "scrolling bar" loading screen and just after I have logged into windows

I use win XP professional x64 edition in case that helps.

[Quintare]

What kind of ram do you have and how much? If you have multiple sticks are they all the same speed?

[Sollo]

I agree. It sounds like a RAM problem. Either you have an unmatched set or one of your sticks is bad.

It could be other things too, but less likely. There could be something wrong with your mother board, or any other electronic component connected to your system. With most things the failure will be consistant. The memory is the main thing that could cause random intermittent failures like you describe.

If you have 2 memory sticks, try taking them out and swapping their positions with each other and see if the symptoms change.

[TheUncleanOne]

Didn't you have RAM issues with your last PC Spirit? You gotta stop buying from that back alley....

[Fate]

could be a plug and play thing (i.e. network card) that it is waiting for a response. However sounds like one of those random things that is so hard to pin down and for some reason eventually go away.

[Quintare]

j00 bin h4x!! Some kind of spyware could be interfering with your start up procedures. Maybe?

Also, very thin possibility here but maybe, it could be your BIOS. The website of the manufacturer could help you flash your bios to the latest code if your board is not already running it.

[spiritofice]

I do use 2 RAM sticks, both 512MB, so i'll check it out


For the moment Im beating the problem by never turning my pc off, but i have a feeling that could cause more problems than it solves.

[Quintare]

Not really. I reboot my box about once a month at most, unless I wake up like I did this morning to find out that window's update rebooted for me. If you frequently add or remove programs, or play lots of little flash and java programs on the web then you might be better off by rebooting more frequently, but frankly I find that rebooting just makes life more complicated than it needs to be.

[ronin]

I had a similar problem with an old pc. It turned out to be a circuit on the graphics card that was too thin. It always kept freezing the pc at first startup, but always worked fine after a reboot. Why? Because the heat expanded the circuit...

[spiritofice]

Well it seems to be either not doing it, or doing it much less now that I ahve defragmented my hard drive. I realised Id never actually done it on this pc, so it did a lot of work. I also swapped my RAM chips round, and the side of my pc is now permanantly off to make it a bit cooler.

[Quintare]

heat could do all that too... good call there unless it's exposed to a lot of dust. It would be a rather strange kind of error for fragmented disk drive to make I think, although I imagine a messy registry could do that to you.

guess the best thing you can do is just monitor it and keep track of symptoms that might be related.

[Fate]

could be a bad sector on the disk and the defrag move the file causing the problem to a different sector.

[Quintare]

You can test for bad sectors... it's worth a try. Most manufactures of hard drives have testing software available on their websites, try running a diagnostic on it.