I have a problem with my PC freezing up constantly and I need a little advice. I have an 1ghz Athlon Thunderbird with 756mb ram, 2-120gb hard drives, ATI All In Wonder graphics card (128mb) and the motherboard is an MSI. I use this PC mainly for email and web surfing and my other PC for video editing, DVD burning, etc. My first thought was that there was a software conflict or that I had spyware on my machine so I reformatted and reloaded WinXP. It froze up during the XP install and I had to start over again. I finally got it installed and then it froze up while trying to install SP2. I finally got that installed. So now I think it's probably hardware related, but what? I installed a new graphics card, although I really didn't think that was the problem. I ran Windows Memory Diagnostic and it showed that the memory was fine. I realize that this test probably isn't 100% accurate but it passed the test. It seems to freeze up more often when I'm running something that takes a while, like Spybot S&D scans. If I just have my email open or just surf the web, I don't seem to have the problem as often. Can anyone give me some suggestions as to what I should try next to isolate the problem. Do you think the motherboard could be going bad and if so, how would I test it? Your expertise and experience would be appreciated. Thanks, Barb

When you had the initial problem loading WIndows you could have/should have stopped there and sorted it out. If the hardware is not right, Windows is not going to fix it.

I didn't expect Windows to fix the problem if it was hardware related. I'm afraid I don't know how to troubleshoot a hardware problem if I don't have an OS loaded so I can boot it to find out if whatever I try works. To the best of my knowledge, which I admit is limited, there was no way to tell if the graphics card was the problem if I couldn't boot the PC. Barb

Unfortunaltely with something like this there are no hard and fast rules it is a combination of luck, judgement and experience. My suspicions would firstly fall to the ram. There are diagnostic utilities avaialble but if you are not happy with them try removing one of the sticks and see if it cures it. After the RAM I would look at the harddrives, they could be developing bad sectors or they could be failing. Again the solution is the same, run diagnostics and try swapping around. Other things could be the chip overheating and yes a comoponant on the motherboard could be failing.

my bet is the motherboard is bad. There is no way to test it. But it might work at a lower front side bus speed, which you would not notice on the applications you listed. Find the board here: http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_archives.asp?class=mb and download the manual to see how to adjust the fsb speed. It may be adjustable in the bios or using motherboard jumpers.

Thanks to all for the suggestions. I will give them a try. I sure hope it's not the motherboard but it sure is a good possibility. I built this computer about 5 years ago and I guess nothing lasts forever. Barb