I get random freezes just about every day. It happens sometimes when gaming, sometimes when surfing, sometimes after hours of idling. No pattern at all in other words. Everything locks up, ctrl-alt-del doesnīt work and I have to cut the the power. XP Pro is cleanly installed about two weeks ago and I have installed all updates, including SP1a. Iīve tried the following, without success: *Uninstalling Zone Alarm 3.7 *Uninstalling Norton 2002 *Latest VIA driver *Latest driver for videocard and soundcard *Disabled the onboard sound *CPU temperature is fine *Ran Memtest, found no errors in RAM *Checked for scumware or viruses System is not overclocked (9x100, default core voltage) and I have had these freezes since the clean install. I had them before too. Iīve noticed that there are a 6 things sharing IRQ number 5: *MS ACPI *video card *VIA USB Universal Host Controller (2 of these!) *Ethernet card *Sound card Is this the cause? Please help. It feels like I have tried everything and the d**n thing still freezes. /JP

Run a scandisk or chkdsk on the hard drive. Make sure there are no bad sectors on it. Load a test operating system like 98. If it still freezes then it's gotta be a hardware problem.

Can you go into bios and make sure ACPI is enabled? that will enable you to avoid irq conflicts make sure nothing inside your computer is overheating, mainly check your processor, and your video card

again, check your powersupply, try replacing it with a good one (no generic power supplies). try adding more memory. you might have a memory leak. the temperature of your cpu is very important as well. ^_^ - good luck

Thanks for the replies guys. I ran a chkdsk, the drive was fine. ACPI is enabled in BIOS. The CPU temp is around 40 C under normal load, which is well within the Duronīs limits. Changing the power supply and adding/changing RAM-sticks involves spending money and I donīt want to spend any if Iīm not sure that it really is the PSU or the RAM that is faulty. Just a question about temps: How can I check if my videocard is overheating? I donīt think the freezes are due to overheated videocard though, since the freezes are random, for instance when the computer has been idling for hours with no graphical stuff going on at all.

The reason he mentioned the power supply is becuase insufficient power can lead to frequent lockups, especially in XP. Since it is the responsibility of this component to make sure all devices have adequete power I would look at this first. If you have less than 300 watts chances are you would be better of going bigger, 400+ watts. I dont know what components you have, but if your system is newer it will need enough power to keep everything powered up enough to keep your system stable. If you want you can try and remove devices that you may not be using that could be eating up power(extra ram, dial-up modem if not used, firewire ect..) Whatever your system seems to not require to operate. If you achieve stability this could be a good indication of insufficient power. Just an idea that may save you the hearache of formatting 10 times and possibly screwing something up in the process. Anyways hope this is somewhat helpful -Late

Thanks Ryan. My power supply is only 250 Watts. I have two HDDs, videocard, ethernetcard, soundcard, two sticks of 128 RAM, CD-RW and a floppy so I guess the system consumes more than the PSU can offer.