How to Diagnose systems freezing

I am trying to fix a friends PC. It freezes and requires a switch off regularly. The freezing is almost guaranteed to happen if virus software is doing a scan, whether Norton's (now uninstalled) or AVG even in SafeMode. The PC also freezes at many other times when surfing the web, or doing anything.

I have run Memtest86+ 1.51 and removed one bad stick of memory. I have updated drivers where I can, I have defragged and cleared out temp files.
I have removed all uneccessary programs from Start Up.

I have removed spyware (there was a few things) and removed 2 viruses. I have updated Windows also and I check the temperatures (all fine).

However, the system freezes still happen. Any ideas what I should try next?

System is Windows XP Pro.
ECS K7VZa Motherboard
Geforce2
1.1 Athlon

 

Hi PeteC - thanks for the reply.

Under Event Viewer - system I have a lot of errors with source reading as "acpi "
also "service control manager" and "DCOM "

Under Event Viewre - application there are a few (much less) errors saying "application Hang ".

I will post with the entry I get after next system hang.

 

I ran AVG virus scan and system froze as usual. Event viewer-system has 2 entries that read "acpi ". The properties read:
AMLI: ACPI BIOS is attempting to read from an illegal IO port address (0xcfc), which lies in the 0xcf8 - 0xcff protected address range. This could lead to system instability. Please contact your system vendor for technical assistance.

and

AMLI: ACPI BIOS is attempting to write to an illegal IO port address (0xcf8), which lies in the 0xcf8 - 0xcff protected address range. This could lead to system instability. Please contact your system vendor for technical assistance.

Anyone know what this means?

Tia
Silver

Edit - done some searching and it appears that this message usually requires a BIOS upgrade....

 

Hi silverwork,
Me, I would think it may be the antivirus trying to access the wrong hardware. I would disable the antivirus from running automatically (at startup or in the background) and see how it ran then.
If it proved to be due to the antivirus, I would try uninstalling and reinstalling it.

I no longer have an automatic antivirus, I have lost confidence in them. I run my antivirus ocassionally, but have learnt how viruses infect the computer and take precautionary steps (email attachments, downloads, other infected drives, etc). Run the computer with the antivirus disabled while it has no contact with any "outside" influences.

Matt

 

Hi Mattman - thanks for taking the time to reply.

The anti-virus is set to manual run only. I have uninstalled it and reinstalled a different anti-virus product, the pc will hang 95% of the time I run a manual scan.

PC also freezes at other times...... I am not sure whether to rick the BIOS upgrade as it is a pretty old board - with a tricky process and I beleive it is quite risky..

 

Just to throw another possibility at you. Run Checkdisk.

I'm not completely certain it would be fixed by a BIOS upgrade, but since it may seem the best possibility, I would certainly try it. It is not really "risky ", you just have to be careful and follow the instructions.
Do a "floppy style" upgrade. These have the least possibility of something going wrong. EDIT: especially since your Windows system is unstable.
The main worries are if the upgrade is for the wrong model of motherboard or for some reason there is a power stoppage or the system crashes.
From your previous threads, I know you would be careful about the proceedure. You should have no problems.

Matt