XP freezes

I have recently installed XP and after several restarts and a bunch of problems I think I have whittled it down to one left (this was a clean install starting with formatting the HD).

At random times my system just feeezes (unhandled crash?). I have been uable to find any pattern to the crashes, sometimes it does it when the system is idle and other times when it is very busy. I have to be really careful about what I am doing when this happens bacause I have had to reinstall from scratch (format HD) if it crashes when I am installing software, especially XP updates.

The only way out is to cold boot with the hardware reset switch. When it comes back up (after I breath a sigh of relief) there is no notice of any error to send to MS nor anyting in the event log.

Has anyone encountered anything like this or have any suggestions a to how to troubleshoot this? TIA.

 

Have you checked Event Viewer for a hint?

 

Yes. Like I said there was nothing in the event logs. This is going to be a tough nut to crack without some kind of special monitoring. I thought XP was supposed to end all these freezes and trap all errors. So far I dont see any improvment over previous versions in that respect.

 

hardware problem???

Let me throw in my two cents... I may be way off base here, but if there is no entry of a problem in the event log, I would tend to think it might be hardware related or maybe a heat issue. This could be a sign that something is starting to fail. Just a thought...

B

 

I thought of that and I suppose anything is possible. However, it seems much too coincidental that my hardware would start to fail as soon as I install XP (was running ME previously).

One thing that has happened is on rare occasions, rather then freeze there is an actual crash. Unfortunately, the failure analysis from MS only tells me it is a driver failure. I can understand that it cannot provide the nature of the failure but what I don't understand is why it cannot at least tell me which driver it thinks failed. There is also no way to know if these are seperate problems or different manifestations of the same problem.

 

I had a similar problem trying to replace a Win98 system with XP. Soon XP was flakey and randomly froze. (Had latest BIOS on a Gigabyte 7VRXP board.) Went back to '98 and things were again fine. Formated and reinstalled XP and again randomly froze. Ended up replacing HD to permanently fix this. I don't know what the original problem was - mayby soft sectors?

Good luck
TopDog

 

gw1500se

My pc froze also. I decided it was overheat so I went to BIOS setup and changed my numbers. Once in awhile it still does but not consisitently.
I wrote to AMD to see if the fans I had were correct and they wrote and told me that is what they use on their set ups.
Pat

 

Drivers??

One of the biggest reasons Windows XP does strange things on a computer that previously ran Win98 or Win98-SE is the drivers for the hardware that's installed.

Drives for Scanners, CD/DVD Burners are quite different in may cases, as are those for Video cards, printers and other peripherals.

When I formatted my drives and installed XP, I immediately updated all drivers, and all Windows updates. I haven't had a single problem to date.

Hope this helps a little.

Griz

 

Memory?

Just a thought... I had a similar problem and it turned out to be very little memory left for the system operate. Have a look in your task manager CRTL-ALT-DEL/Performance) and check how much memory is free. Maybe you are loading to much stuff during the boot?

In my case, I used jvPowerTools (a freeware tool) ans started to eliminate the programs that would run during boot until I found the culprit. Takes a few reboots but it is worth...

Good luck!

 

I already checked that. I have 1/2 gig and the lowest free memory I've seen is 175 meg. Right now I'm leaning toward the hard drive theory suggested by top dog.