Diagnose me please

[wildbeeste]

I have a three year old AMD 2100+ running XP Home. It has been fine but has started freezing intermitently when certain programs are run but is ok for most of the time. It is ok with word, excel, dragon naturally speaking and Mozilla Firefox. It often freezes during Norton virus check (after about 90,000 files) and
other naff things the kids use.
It also is often quite slow when starting to run an installation program (pauses for up to 30 seconds) and then runs fine.
I Backed up and formatted and reloaded XP. Which took ages as it kept freezing during the loading and formatting process. (must have restarted it 15 times)
The symptoms are still there.
I think my hard disc is failing though I cannot run any diagnosis programs as they immediately freeze.
Any views would be appreciated.
Thanks

 

[cookie]

if it freezes etc. during windows install , then i'd say it's either a corrupt install cd or a hardware fault.

since the problem was there before the install, that rather points to a hardware fault.

did you get any HDD errors reported during install?

 

[wildbeeste]

Twice got an IRQ message about not being equal or greater or less than. It made no sense - But hey what does in compter speak.

 

[cookie]

that's not an uncommon error message, but i've forgotten what it refers to

google

 

[(RIP) Kaister]

could be a memory i/o timing problem ?

or overheating - have you cleaned the cpu heatsink lately ?

 

[Clive]

I have a three year old AMD 2100+ running XP Home.

How many memory chips do you have in it ?

I had a similar problem - eventually started getting blue screen, then finally no boot-up, just some beeps.

I messed around with removing bits and finally worked out that the original memory chip was duff - removed it and put the second (additional) memory chip in the first slot - it has been fine since.

 

[wildbeeste]

could be a memory i/o timing problem ?

or overheating - have you cleaned the cpu heatsink lately ?

The freezing happens at any time even upon start up
Heat sink is clean

What is a memory i/o problem

It has one chip 512MB
Thanks
Paul

 

[Clive]

It has one chip 512MB

Buy another chip *exactly* the same e.g. from http://www.crucial.com/uk/

Replace existing chip with the new one - see if it works - if it does, fine, chuck the old chip. If it doesn't - it's probably something else but you can never have too much memory anyway

 

[wildbeeste]

ok will do
I will take some of the memory from another computer
That is if it is the same type
Thanks everyone
Paul

 

[wildbeeste]

do not know if this is good or bad
Everything works
Put in new memory - ran memory tests ok
Blew a lot of dust off one side of old memory - put it back in with new memory
ran tests ok.
If its working I will leave it alone
Thanks for the advice
I will be back if it stops

 

[Iain Hogg]

How about a bad contact on the memory card?

It's always worth reseating memory modules and connectors on an old PC (he says helpfully now the PC is fixed )

Iain

 

[wildbeeste]

How about a bad contact on the memory card?

It's always worth reseating memory modules and connectors on an old PC (he says helpfully now the PC is fixed )

Iain

As far as I can tell you were right Iain
Better late than never