Windows XP frequent hangs

pAUL shillam

OK i have now run online RAV with no problems and apart from the mouse freeze some 12 hours ago, all is ok. This is a great improment but I will keep you posted.

 

Good news indeed.

 

Great PAUL, hope it stays that way.

One thing that I woud do is make sure that the Mouse has the latest drivers.

Regards - Charles

 

While pleased that you have come this far, you still need to give serious consideration to a power supply more appropriately matched to your system and, your 57C CPU temperature is too high. If you want recommendations, I'll provide them, but you shouldn't consider yourself out of the woods yet. Regardless, glad to learn of the progress you have made to date.



edit: guess that was 56C - still much higher than it should be for long term trouble free operating environment.

 

Paul Shillam

I have a microsoft optical mouse, when it started hanging I tried an ordinary mouse but still hung.
I have a big heatsink and fan on the CPU and it has always run at that temp' so I don't know what I can do about that. I will consider getting a larger PSU, they are about £47 on the web.

 

Hi Paul...

You should run the Power Supply Wattage Calculator to make sure you are buying one large enough.

 

Paul Shillam

I have downloaded the latest driver for my mouse but since then I have had two mouse freezes requiring reboots and one complete system hang, thats in about 3 hours. So I'm still in trouble.

 

You can do a lot to improve that - bigger doesn't necessarily mean better re: CPU coolers. Here's a great mid-sized cooler thats extremely quiet. Use Artic Silver heatsink compound with it. You'll drop down into the mid-high 40's without a problem. You might be able to find this for a few bucks cheaper but $25 isn't a bad price.

PSU - This may be a bit more than you need but I've had nothing but good experiences with this particular PSU. Aluminum case and dual BB fans is a plus but look at the amperage on each of the rails and try to find something comparable for this price.



edit: As said earlier, you're not quite out of the woods yet.

 

Paul Shillam

I've replaced the PSU with a 550W one and have also replaced the CPU fan and heat sink with the one recommended, the CPU temp is running at 42C.
Unfortunately the mouse hung after 10 minutes of powering up. As the system is still running when the mouse hangs is there anyway to get any information out of the system that will give me a clue why it stopped working?

 

Paul - I like your approach - no messing around, cut right to the chase. OK, couple of thoughts from this end, maybe some others have additional recommendations.

Right click on My Computer, go to Manage->SystemTools->Event Viewer and look at your Application logs and System Logs for clues re: hung apps or other problems. Post back if you see a pattern or repetitive error.

May want to uninstall mouse drivers, follow with RegCleaner and re-install. Personally, (and I'm a bit old fashioned on this) I never load mouse drivers even though I've got a couple of trick mice. Give me two buttons and a scroll wheel and I'm a happy camper.

Lastly (and I'm more inclined to think this may provide a solution) - what can you tell me about your memory settings in the BIOS? I'll go back and re-read this thread to see if I can pick up any clues but we might want to do a little fine tuning here.

After thought - we'll wait on this one, but I may give you a voltage adjustment recommendation once we've tried a couple of other things.

 

Paul Shillam

I frequently look in the event viewer especially after a hang but theres never anything out of the norm in it.
Here are my BIOS memory settings
DRAM Timing
Top Performance - Disabled
DRAM Frequencey - 133MHZ
SDRAM CAS# Latency - 3

DRAM Drive strength - Auto
MD Bus Strength - High
CAS Bus Strength - High
Delay DRAM Read Latch - 1.0ns
Memory Data Drive - 8ma
SDRAM Command Drive - 24ma
Memory Address Drive - 24ma
CAS# Drive - 12ma
RAS# Drive - 24ma

 

Paul:

Must say there are a few terms that I am not familiar with and appear to be somewhat divorced from the norm, but that could just be my own limitation. Not to scare you, I am quite familiar with most memory tweaks and do a considerable amount of machine overclocking so advanced memory settings are not foriegn turf by any means. Having said that, I will make no recommendations regarding anything I am unfamiliar or uncomfortable with. Those "not going to be touched" settings include memory data drive, SDRAM command drive, memory address drive, cas# drive and ras# drive. Have seen similar settings expressed in terms of cycles 0,1,2 but not with ma suffixes.

When one adjusts memory settings to correct a potential problem or to optimize performance, patience is key critical. My recommendation is to make one change at a time and test things out thoroughly before negating a change or moving to a next step. If you wind up unbootable at any point in time, you can first try restarting while holding down the control key or you can disconnect the ATX power header from the motherboard and move the CMOS 2 pin jumper from pins 1&2 (run) to pins 2&3 (reset), waiting 5-10 seconds and rejumpering to 1&2. Then reconnect the ATX power header and power up, moving directly into BIOS to reset everything if necessary - Actually not that big of a deal but it can be painfully slow going.

Now the changes in order of priority (one at a time please) until stability is achieved. When you stabalize - stop making changes.
1 MD Drive strength (your board calls it bus strength) - Low
2 Delay Dram Read Latch (options should be none, auto, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0) - Auto
3 Top performance (may cause unbootable situation but I recommend this because you are running CAS 3 and with that slow of memory you should easily be able to optimize it) - Enabled

If you had DDR I'd alter your latency first, but not with SDRAM in this case. I don't see anything else that I would recommend changing but I certainly have no monopoly on knowledge or experience so if anyone else sees something - all comments are welcome. If this brings no relief, I will give you a very simple and safe voltage adjustment that is among my first steps to tackle stability issues.
Be patient, go slow and post back .....

note: I'm also assuming you first removed and re-installed mouse drivers with no change in behavior.

 

Paul Shillam

My BIOS does not let me change the MD Drive strength or the Delay Dram read Latch. I can get it to change if I select F6 for Fail-Safe but then when I boot up the mouse does not work at all so I have to go back and select F7 for Optimized to change the setting back.
I hape changed the Top Performance to Enabled but that has not stopped the hangs.
I have unloaded the mouse drivers and loaded a later version from microsoft but no change.

 

Paul Shillam

Further to my last posting, I found that when I loaded the Fail-Safe BIOS defaults it disabled the USB controller, my mouse is USB hence that was why it did not work.
I am now running with the Fail-Safe defaults (except USB controller enabled)
It changed following settings.

MD Bus strength - Low
CAS Bus strength - Low
Delay DRAM Read Latch - No Delay
Memory Data Drive - 6ma
SDRAM Command Drive - 16ma
Memory Address Drive - 16ma
CAS# Drive - 8ma
RAS# Drive - 16ma

So far no problems but it is early days.

 

Paul,
Somewhere in this thread I noticed you said that you saw that rundll32.exe was running and sucking up almost teh whole CPU.
Did you ever find the cause of that?
Was whatever was causing that the cause of your problem?

I have been having a rundll32.exe problem for awhile now. When it occurs my cpu goes to 100% (98% or so being rundll32.exe) and everything goes to an extremely slow crawl. I reboot and maybe 3days or a week later same thing. I can't seem to find the cause.

 

Paul Shillam

Zinco, I can't see any mention of Rundll32.exe in this thread, I don't have a probelm with the system running slow.

Since loading the Fail-Safe BIOS defaults I have had one mouse hang and one system hang.

 

Sorry to be slow responding, bear of a day (and night) yesterday. Regret learning that you have limited adjustment capability re: BIOS but we'll just have to live with that. I'm not so sure that your "failsafe settings" are where you want to be but again - slow, methodical patient approach is best here. I trust you are getting familiar enough with these settings that you are getting a pretty good handle on what does and doesn't work.

When you mentioned USB mouse, my first curiosity question was, "what about a PS2 mouse - same behavior? Win98 used to have an inherent IRQ conflict with native USB ports conflicting with PCI devices in slot 5 on some MoBo's (usually IRQ 11) - this is not the case with XP and this problem was quite limited and MoBo specific - I only mention it because you might want to file this in the back of your head if the USB mouse is the only thing hanging up your system. Currently, I don't think this is the case.

If you're game, I'd like to try something else. You can set it back at any time and this is not going to harm your system or your processor. Default VCore voltage for your processor is 1.75V. See if you can set your power manually within the BIOS and bump it to 1.775V. At the same time, I'd also try your previous memory settings and (if necessary) then try your default "failsafe" memory settings. Don't change any other Voltage settings. This should give you more stability and may increase your CPU temp 2-3C. Not a problem with your current CPU heatsink and cooler. Stay under 1.8V

I'll look forward to your comments.

 

Paul Shillam

Yes I have tried a PS2 mouse with same behaviour.
I can't change any voltages in my BIOS.
The PC worked for three or four years with the default BIOS settings without a problem why would they now need to be tweeked?

 

Didn't you say you changed out your memory?
Were the original settings you gave me for memory different than what you gave me when set at default or failsafe as you called it? Why the difference if you have been running at default for 3-4 years? Who changed them?
Have you added or changed any other components?
Did you have 3 hard drives all along?
Same mouse?

Quick answer - leave them at default, I was only trying to help you get over your hung mouse and since you've cleaned up the two anti-virus programs running simultaneously, report no errors, no spyware and have a clean HiJack This log - I have no further advice.

Unfortunately, you can't tweak your BIOS. None of my BIOS TWEAKING suggestions can be or have been implemented because your BIOS isn't sophisticated enough. So .......... there is no answer to your question. They can't be tweaked.

Good Luck ..........

 

Paul Shillam

I have replaced my memory Dim.
My BIOS gives me 2 default options, 'Optimized' which is what I have been running with for 3/4 years without problem and 'Failsafe' which I only tried two day ago to see if it made any difference. The Optimized settings were what I posted to you originaly.
The only component changed have been what you have suggested, memory,PSU and CPU fan.
I have alway had 3 hard drives.
The mouse is the same one I have had for a long time.
I have followed all suggestions that have been given, unfortunately none seem to have helped but I am gratefull for everyones efforts.