PC freezes in X moment.

[Rhor]

Hi.

As the topic title says, my PC freezes under certain conditions that I cannot seem to find. No BSOD appears, instead everything stops working, and when I have music playing, the last milisecond played of the track gets stuck. When I copy a large amount of info, maybe 8 GB or more from my main HDD to another USB backup drive its the same, or when I play World Of Warcraft, I log in and 1 minute after I have to reset the machine, so I think the problem should be the RAM, or the SATA controller on my cheap motherboard.

I have the lastest patches for XP and lastest drivers for all the hardware, and a lot of fans blowing air.

Here are my specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6420 (No overclocking)

ASRocl 4CoreDual-VSTA motherboard

Kingston 2 GB DDR2-800 in dual channel working at 533 Mhz due to motherboard limitations.

ATI Radeon All In Wonder 9800 Pro 128 Mb

Gigabyte Aurora 3D Case

Please, if somebody have any ideas, let me know.

Thanks in advance.

[cluberti]

If you have a PS/2 keyboard attached (or one you can attach temporarily), you could configure the box for a complete dump, and then dump it via the keyboard the next time it hangs (follow the instructions in the "Memory dump of the entire system" section).

[Rhor]

If you have a PS/2 keyboard attached (or one you can attach temporarily), you could configure the box for a complete dump, and then dump it via the keyboard the next time it hangs (follow the instructions in the "Memory dump of the entire system" section).

Now, that's a hell of a sugestion!!. I will surely try it and I will be back with the conclusion.

Thanks so much for the idea.

EDIT: One question, Im confused about what version I should use if I have a Core 2 Duo (wich supports 64 bit extensions) and XP 32 bits. I should download the 32 or 64 bits package of Debugging Tools?

Thanks again.

Edited March 1, 2008 by Rhor

[rendrag]

i'm pretty certain it's based on your XP edition, not CPU, so use the 32-bit version

[Rhor]

i'm pretty certain it's based on your XP edition, not CPU, so use the 32-bit version

I did it already, and since I wanted to reproduce the problem, I fired up WoW.

I did follow the procedure to have a complete system dump, I opened the case just to make sure it was not a heat problem, turned the fans to max rpm, and after a few minutes, the whole system froze. I then pressed Right Control + Scroll Lock twice as it was indicated but no luck, I restarted the system and I didnt find any dump file or logs of anything, so I dont know where the problem comes from.

[cluberti]

i'm pretty certain it's based on your XP edition, not CPU, so use the 32-bit version

I did it already, and since I wanted to reproduce the problem, I fired up WoW.

I did follow the procedure to have a complete system dump, I opened the case just to make sure it was not a heat problem, turned the fans to max rpm, and after a few minutes, the whole system froze. I then pressed Right Control + Scroll Lock twice as it was indicated but no luck, I restarted the system and I didnt find any dump file or logs of anything, so I dont know where the problem comes from.

Well, if you held down the right-hand side CTRL key whilst you pressed scroll lock twice, and you are indeed using a PS/2 keyboard (and not a USB keyboard), the box should have crashed if the kernel was still running. Again, if you are certain that you held down the right-hand CTRL key while pressing scroll lock twice with a PS/2 keyboard and the box didn't crash, this indicates a hardware problem (the PS/2 bus is an interrupt bus, meaning that even if the software is hung, if the kernel is running it WILL handle the interrupt and crash the box - if the kernel itself is hung and interrupts aren't being serviced, it's 99% of the time a hardware problem when the keyboard dump doesn't work).

[Rhor]

Well, if you held down the right-hand side CTRL key whilst you pressed scroll lock twice, and you are indeed using a PS/2 keyboard (and not a USB keyboard), the box should have crashed if the kernel was still running. Again, if you are certain that you held down the right-hand CTRL key while pressing scroll lock twice with a PS/2 keyboard and the box didn't crash, this indicates a hardware problem (the PS/2 bus is an interrupt bus, meaning that even if the software is hung, if the kernel is running it WILL handle the interrupt and crash the box - if the kernel itself is hung and interrupts aren't being serviced, it's 99% of the time a hardware problem when the keyboard dump doesn't work).

Thats good information. And yes, I have a PS2 keyboard, and I pressed the correct keys, holding down Right Control I pressed Scroll Lock twice.

Now its a matter of knowing what part of my PC is defective.

Could a new PCI SATA controller card help in this case?, Im thinking about it because I the problem usually happens when the HDD is very busy. Large transfers between drives and USB devices issues lead to the same end.

My backup HDD is inside of an Antec MX1 external case, wich has support for eSata and USB, and since the beginning I had to use the USB interface, otherwise the PC would freeze, and, on top of that, I cannot connect for long any USB device, Windows will freeze.

[Rhor]

Seems like I resolved the problem attaching a heatsink and a fan blowing directly to the southbridge.