PC randomly freezing after power surge

The pc in question was hit by a power surge.Fried the printer and the mother board.I discarded the printer but had the geek squad replace the motherboard as the pc was still under warranty.Before the replacement of the motherboard the pc would not switch on at all.After the new board was installed and the pc was back up and running(geek squad left at that point)I started noticing that it would freeze up even at idle. Sometimes it freezes as soon as windows desktop is loaded and sometimes it runs good for a while and then freezes.I have opened task manager and watched it carefully as it loaded all the processes until it was idle(1-5% cpu usage).CPU and memory usage abruptly spikes to 100% and it freezes.Only way to shut down is to hold down the on button.CPU cooling fan also kicks into high gear when this happens and stays that way until I manually shutdown. Does anyone have any idea as to how I can figure out what is causing this and what I should replace?

 

Hi,
The squad may have replaced the motherboard with a different model and it is still running on the old drivers. Did they leave a drivers disk for you? If they replaced it with a different model, they should have done this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/824125/en-us

There could be damage to the file system or surface of the HDD. Run Error Checking (see Help and Support) on your Windows drive (C: ?). Put a check in the boxes (Automatically fix... and Scan for errors on the surface). Run E.C. on any other drives on the harddisk as well.

"Random" is not very helpful for us. If a piece of hardware has been transferred and it is not working correctly, the only way you might identify it is by watching exactly when the freeze occurs (what hardware might be being accessed) or being able to reproduce the freeze yourself and we might be able to identify it that way.

Check in Event Viewer (see Help and Support) for any errors around the time of the freezes.

Matt

 

hllstrHUNTER,
From my past experience on this Issue I would also supect the Units Power Supply as being suspect, and it also may need replacing.

 

The processor may have also been damaged. Did they bother to check it?

 

did they replace the RAM?
That could have gotten toasted.

 

Not a thing - don't replace anything. As all of the above comments suggest, a power surge can do considerable damage and its evident that the motherboard replacement alone wasn't enough to "fix" your machine.

My suggestion is that you take this back and have them stress test it in an attempt to determine the problem component(s). PSU, CPU and memory are potential problem candidates but there could be others too.

Now, your downside is that power surges and/or lightning strikes are going to void any warranty so you need to be somewhat cautious and reserved in describing the genesis of this problem. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately in your case, The "Geek Squad" are proficient part changers but for the most part, they come up a little short in the diagnostics department. You may be well advised to avoid any "surge statements" and focus solely on the fact that replacing the motherboard didn't fix your problem.

 

Thank you everyone for the replies..I think I will take Rockster2u's advice and take it to someone who can diagnose this problem firsthand. I have pulled enough of my own hair out dealing with it.Thanx again