Intermitten Lockups

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My Computer locksup for no reason whatsoever does anyone have an idea why? I have some idea from what I learned in my Mike Meyers book but I thought I would ask.

Professor Falken

 

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You don't say how often this occurs or what you are doing when the system locks up. Sometimes launching a process or application that is having a problem causes a lockup. Here are some suggestions I found from Googling:

What does the event logs say?
Boot into safe mode and run chkdsk
In safe mode run antivirus and antispyware scanners
Run task manager in safe mode to see if you can see the problem process
Do a general inspection inside the PC case. It could be a motherboard, video card, or HDD issue.

Macro viruses can cause this sort of issue so it might be related to an MS Office application. I also found a nice little site at IBM that has a lot of suggestions for troubleshooting PC performance issues:

http://www-304.ibm.com/jct01004c/sy...ocdisplay?brandind=5000008&lndocid=MIGR-42598

Good luck, Professor.

 

I would check for spyware and viruses first.

 

Professor-Falken,

Do you have an Intel CPU?

 

Good iedeas there, also check you psu could be a power problem but its more likley to be the mobo or graphics card than the PSU

 

We really need a little more info on when it locksup, how often, what you have open at the time...does the image on screen freeze or go black.

Some good suggestions so far but it's all a bit of guess work until we know more.

 

Could be anything, literally. Bad hardware, bad driver, application that conflicts with another application or is incompatible with your system, malware... just about anything. That's what the troubleshooting process is for.

 

If you saw any of my previous posts about my graphics card and lockup and random re-boot the broblem ended up being a miss .dll file I never figured out wether it was the malware I had or a registry cleaner I had but after a re-format, reinstall it was ok.

check for malware and check all your .dll files are there

 

As everyone before me has stated, it could be any number of issues. I had a similar problem for some time that had no pattern, and happened regardless what was running. Nothing showed up in any diagnostics. Turned out to be a bad mouse.

Pay close attention to what you're doing each time it happens. What programs are running, every little detail you can.

Keep us informed,
Bill

 

Prof

Plenty of suggestions above.
Just a friendly note, when you say you have some idea, could you let us know what that idea is?

 

random *lock-ups* can be a nightmare to troubleshoot.

if there are no entries in event viewer and all your drivers are OK (you can use run > sigverif for this, then it might be worth removing hardware one by one. Any new hardware?

Boyce

 

Yeps - Event Viewer is your friend.

If there aren't any clues in there, try looking for a dump file which might give you some idea.

In my experience (Christ I sound like an old fart when I say that) random lockups (truly random ones) are usually related to a disk failure or bad RAM. It could be the graphics card, but you'd usually have to put some grunt through it for it to start failing.

It could also be overheating - try removing the side of your case and running like that for a while.

The suggestions about possible Spyware, Viruses, Worms etc causing the problem are also good - but without a bit more info we won't be able to narrow it down.

 

Just my 2 cents worth but for random lockups i have seen problems like this when the machine is overheating

Had the PSU power supply with a fan that wasnt working cause this and the same with a sticking CPU fan

might be something else to add to your list of things to check

 

Prof, what operating system are you using?