A month ago, my system started hanging randomly. Sometimes it would happen 2 or 3 times a week. However, within the last 5 days, it's been happening 3 or 3 times a DAY. The system hangs appear to occur during general use and normal CPU load. Sometimes it will happen when I'm not home.

Yesterday, the computer crashed and when I started it up again, my secondary hard drive could no longer be detected by BIOS... on ANY computer. It completely fails to power up. So, at this point, I thought that my problems were over.. that the crashes were the precursors to a hard drive failure. I basically counted my blessings and moved on... however, it has happened again once or twice since I removed that hard drive!

I've been through 3 CLEAN installations of Windows XP to no avail. I've added NO new hardware in the last month except for a new PS/2 mouse. I've ALMOST ruled out the video card because the system seems to perform fine even when the video card is under the most stress.

Processor is a little warm, it always has been (133F idle) but that's well within the stable operating range.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

SYSTEM SPECS:
AMD Athlon XP Barton 2500+
ASUS A7N8X-E DELUXE Motherboard
512MB DDR400 Corsair
Leadtek GF4 Ti4200 128MB Video
Western Digital 80GB Hard drive

Are you overclocking?

Nope. Once, for about a week (three months ago) I set the BIOS settings to Aggressive but when I saw no improvement in performance, I set it back to Optimal. I hardly consider that overclocking, hehe, and even so, I haven't had it on that setting in over two months.

Oh... By the way. I ran a full memory test with MemTest86+ and all results came back clean. That doesn't COMPLETELY rule out the RAM but it certainly helps.

Download a diagnostic utility for your harddrive from the maker of the drive and run it.

Can't be the hard drive. Not only have I gone through two of them, but I've done an entire scan of the drive with the Western Digial utilities and nothing came up :(

BINGO. I disabled the Windows feature that automatically resets the system in case of a serious error, this allowed Windows to record the error in the System Event logs and when it happened this time, I recieved this message...

The driver nv4_disp for the display device \Device\Video0 got stuck in an infinite loop. This usually indicates a problem with the device itself or with the device driver programming the hardware incorrectly. Please check with your hardware device vendor for any driver updates.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Hmmmm, never seen that one before. Forgive my ignorance but looking at the error your getting I would say it looks like your video card that could be the problem. Have you got another you could pop in there just to eliminate if nothing else.

GaryM

Chaintech 9PJL Appogee 800FSB
P4 2.8 HT
Sparkle Platinum 6800GT 256MB
4*256 KINGSTONE PC3200 dual

40 gig IDE
120 Gig sata
DC10+ Video card