Computer Freezing Problems (1 Viewer)

[Adam Sanchez]

Hey everyone,

My computer is driving me nuts and I'm hoping someone might have some suggestions.
This just started happening, so I don't know what could of caused it. I've did the standard fare of updating drivers and I even installed Windows XP again but the problem remains.
I thought it was a video card problem so I went out and bought a new one, but the problem is still here. I kept the card though because I had been wanting it anyway.
My Computer just hans and freezes when I load alot of programs. It seems to happen most when it's a full screen program that has to change the resolution. For example when I try Tomb Raider for it freezes for a long time at the very first Edios Logo and will eventually come out of and the game plays fine.
I also have a Sega Genesis emulator called Gens than I can't even get to load anymore. It worked fine before!
I have a self built system.Pentium 4 1.7 GHZ
Verto Gefore 4 Mx 420 64 Meg AGP Video
Sound Blaster Live 5.1
512 Megs of Ram. 2 128s and a 256 chip.

Could "Bad Ram" possibly cause the problem I am describing? The ram I have is honestly mixed brands, and I'm not even sure if they are all the same speed, 100 or 133. My board supports 133 SD RAM.
I also thought it might be something in my Motherboard BIOS so I updated it but nothing changed. Like I said this only happens with programs that will change the resolution full screen. Things like Internet Explorer, AOL, etc run fine.
Any suggestions are greatly appriecated.

-Adam

 

[JasenP]

My friend fought with his Soyo Dragon system and he thought it was the board, turns out it was faulty RAM.

Check each stick of RAM separately and attempt to duplicate the problem.

 

[Max Leung]

Mixed RAM is a BAD THING.

Remove on of your bad DIMMs, and see if the problems go away. If not, swap the DIMM with the other one, and see if that helps. Failing that, try to get a stick of high-quality Micron (aka Crucial) RAM.

I had a similar problem at work, where my work computer had generic no-name RAM. I told my boss to pick up some Micron RAM, and the mysterious crashing (not just BSODs, but mysterious hanging in Visual C++) went away.

 

[Chris Bardon]

I'll second trying with just one or the other ram chip-couldn't hurt really.

One other thing-is the CPU fan working? Only reason I ask is that I went through something similar a few years back, and it turns out that the fan was just broken, and the CPU was overheating.

 

[Adam Sanchez]

Help! I still haven't fixed this problem.

I tried everything I can think of. I totally unintalled my video card drivers and put the very newest on.

I have checked my RAM chips one by one, and it did it with all of them. I'm pretty positive it's not a RAM issue...

The problem is video based, I am sure of that but I have never seen anything like this.

The issue happens whenever I use any program that has to change the resolution Full screen. Programs like AOL or a web browser that just run in standard windows mode work fine. Bur if I load anything that has to reload the entire screen at a different res, a-freezing we will go!

Does anyone have anymore suggestions? I've reinstalled windows, drivers, bought a new video card, updated the bios, tweaked the bios. Short of a format and reinstall of everything, I am out of ideas. Very annoying...

 

[JasenP]

Maybe the AGP bus? If your mobo has onboard video try using that instead of your add-on card. I know your frustration and I hope you come to a resolution quickly.

 

[Adam Sanchez]

I suppose it could be the AGP Bus but how do I check it or even fix it? No I don't have a video card on the motherboard, but I do have a PCI Video Card I could try. Should I do that?

Also, and I KNOW this ain't good. When I have been turning my computer on sometimes, there has been a very loud and long beep. I've been looking for BIOS Error codes but haven't found that one yet... This is fun!

Grrr...

 

[Adam Sanchez]

Does anyone know of another place on the web I might want to try posting my problem at?

 

[MikeAlletto]

I had this problem with my via based mb. Putting AGP down from 4x to 2x solved all the problems. You should be able to adjust the AGP speed in the bios.

 

[Adam Sanchez]

My Board is VIA based, it's an ECS Elitegroup board. I just tried changing the AGP to 2x... it didn't help. I'm close to formatting my Hard drive... but wondering if that will even help. *Sigh*

 

[Chu Gai]

It doesn't really sound like your system is whacked in any way. With regards to memory, you could always choose a lower CAS in the BIOS to throttle that down a bit to make sure though.
Let's back up a bit. What do you mean when you say certain programs, like the emulator, and I guess TR ran ok before? What exactly was before? XP on a different machine? Is this a completely fresh install on the machine you built? What resolution are you putting the game into and for that matter which Tomb Raider is it?
Not being a big gamer myself, have you contacted EIDOS to inquire if there are any issues with the game on XP?

 

[Adam Sanchez]

I'll be damned but I think I fixed it. It seems to of been an exe file for one of the Emulators I have, in this case for the genesis. Just opening the folder it was in would cause the computer to freeze! I didn't even click on it. But in any case I scanned it for a virus and nothing came up but I deleted it anyway and everything is fine now.

This ordeal was too weird!

 

[MikeAlletto]

Just opening the folder it was in would cause the computer to freeze!

I had that happen once a long, long time ago on my work machine running win98SE, I completely forgot about it! Somehow a file in my downloads directory got corrupted so whenever I opened that directory my machine would crash. Took forever to find out what was going on. Yes, a really wierd error, windows does a ton of extremely stupid things, it amazes me it even works (sometimes).

 

[Max Leung]

Cool! Let us know if the problem comes back, but it looks like you licked it. However, you might consider running chkdsk.exe on your hard drive to make sure there are no other corrupted files that might cause another hang!