PC locking up

GaryS

I have a PC base unit that has been working fine for about 4 years, but a few months ago started to lock up randomly (Running XP home, fully up to date).

Changed memory, graphics card etc, but made no difference.
Formatted and re-installed XP but still having lockup issues.

Funny thing is now that I have wiped it again and installed Ubuntu 10.4 all is running smoothly.

Still do not know why it started giving me problems..... any ideas ?

tronator

GaryS wrote: »

Funny thing is now that I have wiped it again and installed Ubuntu 10.4 all is running smoothly.

Maybe your computer knows what's good?

SCNR

aliEnRIK

Sounds like a driver issue to me

GaryS

Thanks for the replies, do not recall updating any drivers, unless a Windows update would have loaded one.

Will probably leave it running Linux now as all is stable, I use my laptop running Win 7 for most things.

JackRichardPT

GaryS wrote: »

I have a PC base unit that has been working fine for about 4 years, but a few months ago started to lock up randomly (Running XP home, fully up to date).

Changed memory, graphics card etc, but made no difference.
Formatted and re-installed XP but still having lockup issues.

Funny thing is now that I have wiped it again and installed Ubuntu 10.4 all is running smoothly.

Still do not know why it started giving me problems..... any ideas ?

It was probably a virus, some viruses can target your lock system from System 32, resulting in you getting locked out of your PC, while they have time to raid your files.

Its a type of trojan.

After wiping everything, you most likely got rid of it.

aliEnRIK

GaryS wrote: »

Thanks for the replies, do not recall updating any drivers, unless a Windows update would have loaded one.

Will probably leave it running Linux now as all is stable, I use my laptop running Win 7 for most things.

With (Especially older) computers, most require drivers to run properly Even if you go into DEVICE MANAGER and it shows everything as being ok it doesnt mean it is
In example, somone on here had a perfect looking device manager so assumed all drivers were fine, but the computer wasnt running well at all
After installing USB drivers specific to that computer it worked fine

GaryS

Do not think it was a virus as system has been wiped several times and XP reinstalled, but problem still persisted.

System would lock randomly, sometimes after a few minutes, other times it would run fine for a couple of hours. No pattern to what it was doing when it locked.

It was a fully up todate XP system running latest Kaspersky suite.

Same lockup problem when I tried Win 7 on it as well.

turbobob

Check the logs for any critical errors in Event Viewer (Start - Run - eventvwr.msc) it might give some clues as to what is going wrong. Did you try a diagnostic startup to see if the problem still happened? This loads only basic drivers and services. To do this run msconfig and choose diagnostic startup, and reboot.

Strider590

4 Years you say?

Perhaps the CMOS battery has died leaving your RAM/memory timing all off (do you switch of at the mains?).... The way Windows accesses RAM is different to other OS's, which could explain why it seemed ok with Ubuntu.

aliEnRIK

Im still leaning towards drivers

GaryS

Thanks again for replies, although system is now stable on Ubuntu, it would be interesting to see if I missed anything.

I changed the RAM, CMOS battery, graphics card and reformatted HDD prior to each OS install, and still got the same problem.

I left it unused for a few weeks until last week when I switched it back on and it locked up immediately.

That was when I deciced to install Ubuntu again, having tried it a few versions ago (6.** I think).