| The Breakroom > The Water Cooler |
| PC issue |
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| John Rudd:
Ade, I thought it may be have been heat related too... I took the pc into the garage, removed all fans and cleaned them up...Removed the cpu and regreased the contact surfaces... The failures are fairly random... Yesterday it stopped three times within the space of 5 mins :doh:...In the end I gave up and switched off! |
| andyf:
FWIW, two years ago my 10-year old laptop had intermittent crashes. The local guru removed everything which would come out easily (battery, hard drive etc) to create holes in the case, then gave the interior a blast of compressed air to shift the dust. It's been OK ever since (famous last words...). Andy |
| AdeV:
--- Quote from: John Rudd on November 28, 2011, 07:47:09 AM ---Ade, I thought it may be have been heat related too... I took the pc into the garage, removed all fans and cleaned them up...Removed the cpu and regreased the contact surfaces... The failures are fairly random... Yesterday it stopped three times within the space of 5 mins :doh:...In the end I gave up and switched off! --- End quote --- It's definitely worth pulling out and re-seating the memory chips, they're often the cause of intermittent crashes. A cracked motherboard is another possibility - to diagnose that one, power the machine up with the side/top off, then - with an anti-static non-conductive rod (e.g. a broom handle), very gently push the motherboard in a few places - just enough to make it flex a tiny amount. If the machine freezes up, there's a good chance there's either a dry joint or a crack. Either way, the chances of fixing it are slim - better off getting a replacement. IME, if the mouse pointer freezes when the rest of the machine does, it's probably not Windows or any software that's at fault - not if you're running Windows 2000 or newer at any rate. Windows ME/98 & beforehand - that doesn't apply. Therefore, the culprit is almost certainly hardware. It may also be electrical supply, e.g. spikes on the line. As a minimum you should get a surge-suppression plugin or multiway adapter; better yet, get a small UPS - even if it only gives 5 mins battery backup, that's enough to shut down a PC - and as far as I know all UPSes condition the mains to remove surges/spikes/under-or-over voltage/etc. Other things it could be: A failing hard-disk can cause total freeze-ups; a dodgy USB peripheral might do it. If you do remove your heatsink, do make sure you use the proper thermal grease/adhesive when you stick it back on, this is critical with Athlon processors, they will self-destruct if the heatsink isn't attached (Intel chips just slow right down to prevent overheating). |
| John Rudd:
Im leaning towards using the milling machine or lathe to attempt a permanent repair :dremel: Might give the board a poke with big stick and see if I can induce the fault...Failing that I may remove all the plug in bits and start afresh...Just hope the hdd isnt going to fail....I best do a backup.. |
| Chazz:
If the 'lockups' are intermittent, I would reseat your RAM and run a program like 'memtest.exe' or any other free memory testing program, another issue may be your power supply, do you have another 'known good' power supply you can borrow from another system? HTH, Chazz |
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