Be Excellent To Each Other

Ok, my last plea for help was answered and my hard disk hasn't died again.

Now I call upon my fellow BETEO-ers for help once again.

Yesterday, my pc completely locked up. I reset, it got to windows, lasted about 5 minutes and locked up again. Reset again, and this time it locked up while it was still booting.
Time to take it apart.

About 6 months ago, I had a similar problem when one of the pegs holding one of the chip fans on had come loose, so it was only attached on one corner, I assumed this was going to be the problem again, but no.

I couldn't see anything wrong inside (except that it was really dusty), so I ran it with the case off for a bit to check if any of the fans didn't seem to be working, but everything seemed fine. I put the case back on and it ran for about 6-7 hours without issue last night.

I put it back on this morning and it lasted about 20 minutes before locking up, I reset a few times and managed to get it to lock up on the post screen, so I guess it's nothing software related (which I didn't really expect). Temperatures seem fine (and I couldn't find any bits that were really hot to the touch yesterday), although they seemed fine last time it kept doing this.

Any ideas?

In the past that might well suggest something is physically damaged or malfunctioning. Sorry I can't be more precise than that... but I'm sure someone who knows a bit more will be able to advise more.

Have you tried hitting it with a shovel?

Not yet, but soon.

I've got a spare power supply lying around, so I might give that a try. The fact that it ran for ages last night is going to make it tricky to determine if I've fixed the problem or not though.

Perhaps it's just time for a new mobo/cpu/ram package.

Unless you've got spares knocking around so you can do some testing, unfortunately this looks like your only option.

If we're resorting to the "Replace components until it stops" plan, my bet is certainly on that PSU.

I have loads of spares, just not of anything useful.

From past experience, I can probably guarantee if I throw money at it, it will turn out to be something trivial.

Edit - Old PSU located and installed.
Many fingers are crossed.

Changing the PSU would have been my second step. My first would be running it with the case off and a big desk fan pointed at the innards, looping something tasty like prime95 or 3dmark. If that doesn't crash, repeat with the case on and without the fan; if that crashes it is overheating somewhere.

You *have* tried cleaning all the dust out of it, right?

Rich: It ran fine with the case on last night doing all manner of things, but I'd barely got as far as opening Firefox and Outlook before it locked up this morning. I swapped the power supply as it's the only thing I have a spare of to hand.

Sheepeh: Yes I cleaned the dust out, but again, worked fine for about 7 hours yesterday (after cleaning), then suddenly locked up this morning, which is a bit confusing.

I ran it for about 20 minutes ok this morning after I'd changed the power supply and I think it's been up for about 45 minutes now.

If it does it again, then I guess I'm shopping for a new motherboard (and all the upgrade goodness that comes with it), but I'd rather not if I don't have to.

Your help is appreciated, as always.

Granted, and that is odd, but I'd want to eliminate it as a possibility (the desk fan thing is easier than swapping a PSU).

My PC was acting very weird last week. Kept turning itself off, or locking, or going to stand-by and refusing to come out of it. Replacing the PSU seems to have sorted all that

I never do these things the easy way round.



In my (rather limited) experience, if it doesn't make any sense at all, it's the PSU. Let's hope this one works ok.

The PSU can cause pretty much any fault, ever, if it's not working properly. Which is why any PC builder worth their salt will always get a decent branded one over the "£10 1000w ACME PSU" listed on most websites.

A decent PSU saves many headaches down the road.

I know, I know.
My pc is actually about 10 years old now, although the floppy drive (if that even still works) is the only surviving part.
The original PSU that came with it was some kind of super PSU and I have no idea how it kept coping with all the upgrades. Everytime I bought something I had to make sure I had enough money to buy a new PSU, just in case, but I never needed to.
Eventually, my pc started to crash at random, and like today, I happened to have another PSU lying around and that fixed the problem.

Next time I buy one, I promise it'll be a good one.

This is most unlike the Richard I've sought assistance from before. Keeping it simple, eh. Not the usual brain the size of a planet so it must be something really bloody difficult like rebuilding the register using braille and a honey covered keyboard in a wasp factory, while talking only in acronyms.

Put a bloody fan on it. Fufuxache, you're slipping mang!

Haha! Seriously, this is exactly what I would do and advise anyone else to do. It's just when you call me with tech questions I turn the complexity up a notch or three. You don't just get a reputation as a tech wizard by accident you know

Hmmm, I seem to recall that einstein once spent three hours fucking around trying to get my xbox online one saturday morning when all we needed to do was put the demo disc in the machine, like it said to do on the instructions
Still, thats the one and only occasion I've known you to be near flakey 'pootah stuff and it not fix itself immediately

It may be the PSU, or it may be a super bonus level where you have some kind of dodgy bad block on your hard drive which is causing a lock up when it's accessed.

I hate that bonus level.
At the moment I'm just at the stage where I'm not going to know if it's fixed or not until it breaks again.

Looks like it was my (semi-cheapo) power supply then as I've been able to work hard all day with no problems.
Thanks again for everyones help/suggestions.

I love this place

(bunch of useless...)

I was surprised no-one suggested that Joans take off and nuke it from orbit. It is, after all, the only way to be sure.

So so true. Had a number of PC faults that were fixed by power supplies. From blue screens of death through to the reset button causing the machine to hang. New PSU's fixed all of them. And you don't need to spend a fortune to get a decent PSU either. The cheap ones are best avoided however as they (a) break easily and (b) may cause the computer to reset if you sneeze near it, and (c) if the power dips a decent PSU will hang on for longer before switching off. A few weeks back the power dipped for half a second. The Mac (with what is probably a very expensive PSU) stayed up, the Windows box just about managed it, but the Linux box with it's 20 quid PSU fell over.

I even ended up with 3 C64 tape recorders because I didn't realise that the tape recorder is seperalty fused in the C64 power supply. I kept on thinking that I had broken tape recorders when it was the PSU. And can you actually get inside the C64 power supply? No, Commodore kindly filled it with solid plastic so all you have is a giant block of plastic that you can't get at. AND THAT MAKES ME ANGRY!!!!!!

that the psu never works again, true.

So, after working all day yesterday without a hitch, my pc just locked up after about 20 minutes.

Right, come on BETEO people, what do I do now?
Tuesday - PC locks up a couple of times. Take it apart, clean out the dust, can't see anything else wrong. Happily runs for another 6-7 hours
Wednesday - locks up after about 20 minutes, take it apart, replace power supply. Runs fine for about half an hour before I have to go out. Runs fine in short spells for the rest of the day, probably 4 hours max.
Thursday - Runs fine all day, about 14 hours, probably a bit more
Today - Runs fine for about an hour, then I go out. Lasts about 20 minutes before locking up this afternoon, then locks up a few times in quick succession.
Just locked up again, and now I'm running prime95, which has so far quite happily got as far as test 4 (which is much further than it ever got when I actually did have bad ram)

I've swapped the PSU
It has locked up on the post screen so I don't think it's a software issue
It's quite happily run all day long with me doing things, so I don't think it's a temperature issue (in fact most of the times it's locked up have been when I've first turned it on).
What the hell is wrong with my pc?

I am now accepting recommendations for motherboard/cpu/ram combinations. Budget around £2-300, unless anyone has any other ideas

You seem to be ignoring the Disk drives? Check their cables are in properly?

What wattage is the PSU you have attached? Do you have more than one HD drive attached? does it occur when anything in particular happens? My PC nearly always craches the first time the cd-drive is accessed after I have used a memory intensive application. Could something like this be occurring?
Is there anything else running off the plug/extension lead?
Do your neighbours have a super powered microwave oven they keep turning on?



post screen?

Unfortunately, taking my pc to bits is a bit of a laborious task that I'm not going to do on a friday evening, but I'll probably take it apart tomorrow and give it a proper look
I will say that when I swapped the PSU, I unplugged (and plugged back in) some, but not all, of my drives.
I am currently using an old copy of sisoft sandra (if anyone knows of any other benchmarking software, please suggest it) to benchmark everything I can think of. Meanwhile Prime95 has been going for about an hour, error free.
I'm pretty stumped.

350 watts, it's the PSU I was using before I bought a new one a few months ago and I haven't added any hardware for a bit. The one I was using before (when the lockups started) was 400W

I have 3 hard drives

I haven't put a cd in my pc for ages. It seems to lock up before I even get the chance to do much, usually when I just have Firefox and Outlook open.
Yesterday, it was quite happy for me to run Firefox, Outlook, Internet explorer, Football Manager, Access, Excel, etc with no issues

There are loads of things running from the extension, maybe I should unplug them and see if that's causing it.

Possibly they do.

I should have said POST really, Power On Self Test, the bit at the start where it tells you what you've got hooked up to your pc.

A cheapo PSU will list it's wattage as peak, rather than what it's actually doing, so 350 peak PSU is actually pretty woeful if you're running 4 sticks of ram, a an optical drive, a hard drive, etc.

I'd strip it down to just CPU and fan, 1 stick RAM, and 1 hard drive and gfx card and see how it goes.

Sorry, I assumed you meant POST screen, but wanted to check you weren't referring to posting on the forum! )

Can you unattach 2 of the HDs and still get a relatively normal usage? Might be worth a try.

I wasn't actually referring to accessing the CD-Rom, for example, my PC crashes everytime I click "My Computer" after I play Football Manager. It spins up the drive, then freezes and resets. So I am wondering if something like this is causing it, as it is clearly the cd-drive in my case.

Might be worth booting into Memtest if you can (http://www.memtest.org/) just to check out the RAM.

My theories are "Dodgy HD cable on system drive" and "Fucked mobo", in that order.

Do what sheepeh said, but also take out the gfx card, assuming it has onboard video.

I have never owned a board with onboard video since the days of ATI's Rage chip, so it didn't occur to me.

Right, quick recap.

I appreciate the PSU may decide one day that it's not up to the task, but for two of them (that had both been happy to run this hardware previously) to do so at the same time seems a little weird, having said that I'll probably order a decent PSU in the morning.

I've got 14 hours worth of good usage with everything hooked up, so I'm not sure what stripping the system down will prove. Unless I run it for a few days and it doesn't crash

I've been running Prime95 for 3 hours now - no errors, I've also benchmarked my hard drives without issue (although my system drive is the oldest one and perhaps the one most likely to be knackered, this probably isn't a good way to run a pc).

I don't have onboard gfx, so I'm out of luck there. I'll take it apart tomorrow and see what I can find.
Thanks again for everyones help.

Stripping it down rules out a lot of things in one stroke if it starts to work...you then add parts back in one by one until it stops working properly.

If it's able to fail in the BIOS it's almost 100% a hardware problem, and removing hardware is the easiest way to see which part it is.

Flashing the BIOS is always an option, too. Even if there's no specific BIOS problem right now, upgraded firmware often makes everything play nicer together.

I'd advise against flashing the BIOS while it's in a crashy state. It could easily brick it.

Well that's about 5 and a half hours of Prime95 now, so even though I've swapped them out I'm leaning towards the PSU. I'm thinking if it was anything else hardware related I should be able to stress that hardware and make it break?

Sheepeh, you seem to be our resident expert at quiet pc's. Can you recommend me a nice quiet PSU that should be able to power this lot?

ASUS A8N-E (there hasn't been a new bios for this for over 2 years, and I'm pretty sure I'm running the latest one anyway)
AMD 64 X2 4200+
Geforce 7600 GT
Samsung IDE 300 gig HD
WD SATA 250 gig HD
WD SATA 500 gig HD
DVD writer
CD writer
X-Mystique 7.1 soundcard
WinTV card
wireless network card

thanks again everyone.

I'd go with something like

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/109552

That's the cheaper, less bling version of the ones I use. Mine have lights, and modular power cables. It's up to you if you want those extras.

You can't really go wrong with a Hiper, or a Seasonic.

From a rough estimate you really are running on the edge of your current PSU. It needs to be upgraded even if that isn't the problem.

You want around 500w ish for a stable running I'd say, more if you haven't counted in fans, lights, or anything else attached to the juice.

It looks like that one comes with modular cables? They might be pretty handy as far too much space in my case is taken up by cables.
Lights will be unnecessary as I can't even see the part of the case where the PSU is from here.

Cheers though, I shall have a quick nose around and probably order myself something in the morning.

For what it's worth, I can massively recommend the Corsair HX520W; it's a nice quiet modular power supply, and is actually manufactured by Seasonic (who are aces for PSUs). Review here: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article692-page1.html

Unfortunately I just went to check prices and it seems to have become more expensive than when I got mine: £68 from eBuyer is about the cheapest I've seen (although it does at least come with free delivery).

If there's one thing it's worth spending actual money on it's the PSU.

Ok, I get it, I'm going to buy a new psu.
Incidentally, the ones I've been using are JeanTech ones from PC World (because when I've needed one, I've needed one in a hurry and couldn't wait for delivery). I'm assuming these qualify as "not very good"

Exciting new twist - I've turned my pc on this morning and it sounds like a 360.
I've taken it apart and the case fan appears to be the culprit (I was kind of hoping it would be the PSU), so I guess I'll be ordering one of those as well.