Help Please -My PC Keeps Freezing

eggman

For a while now my computer freezes on most days within the first few minutes of start up. I don’t a get a blue screen or any warning message it just stops in the middle of whatever I am doing.

I recently got a message “Bad CMOS Checksum” and was advised replace the battery on the motherboard so I swapped that.

The freezing hasn’t stopped and I now get a message at start up that reads “Press Del To Set Up or Tab To View Bios Message”. I’ve pressed both and nothing happens and then I get a black screen with a flashing underscore on the top left of the screen. This stays for a few seconds and then start up commences.

Previously there would be a quick run down of hardware checks which I don’t get now.

Since changing the battery my system thinks I have a floppy disc drive which I don’t.

Any help greatly appreciated.

totalsolutions

You have 'lost' the BIOS system settings for your PC. Just pressing Del is not good enough. It's time critical. You are pressing outside a 2 second 'window' when your PC is looking for Del to be pressed. Keep trying and then view the BIOS screens and read the "help" at the bottom of the screen

eggman

Thanks for the quick reply.

Do I load the default settings at the Bios page?

Thanks

Russel245

It kinda sounds like a RAM error. The computer will work until it tries to assign something to a damaged section of the ram then will crash.

If that is the case BIOS settings wont help.



If you have more than one stick of ram in your computer, try removing one of them and see if it crashes still, then swap the sticks. If it crashes with one stick and not the other, you've found your issue.

Edit:
Just read that you got no bluescreen, ram error would cause that, so possibly not that.

Painkiller

Sounds similar to a problem I had when a sata cable kept loosening itself from the hard drive.

Hammyman

eggman wrote: »

Thanks for the quick reply.

Do I load the default settings at the Bios page?

Thanks

You can do but in the basic settings you need to tell it you don't have a floppy drive if there isn't one, and also set the time and date. Somewhere in the BIOS will be a boot order sequence. It is most likely searching for a device that doesn't exist (such as a floppy) which is higher up the list than the hard drive and it is what is causing the delay.

eggman

I was thinking maybe because it is usually during the first start up of the day that it can't cope with any updates. I had Macafee installed so have removed that and put Windows Essentials on because it uses less resources but still it freezes. Once I get over the initial freeze at the first start up of the day it doesn't do it again for the rest of the day. I'll try some of the suggestions so thanks for all of those.