My PC freezes after about 10 mins. How to diagnose?

Tobers

Tobers

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Andy
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When I first turn on my desktop PC in the morning or evening, it will run for 5-10 mins then freeze i.e. no mouse or keyboard response. The display is still on and displaying whatever was on the screen pre freeze.

The only solution is to hit the reset button. Once it restarts, it runs absolutely fine for hours.

I suspect a temperature expansion related issue. I've reseated the CPU, graphics card and memory to no avail. The PC is a "home build" running a quadcore i7 on an ASUS motherboard with 4GB of RAM.

Is there any diagnosis I can do to work out what could be causing the problem?

Ta
 
Weird edited my original post and saved, forum made it into a new post
 
Have you overclocked at all or any other BIOS changes if so set BIOS back to default and try that and make any of the changes one at a time to see what is causing it.

If none of the above applies have you looked in event Viewer, i believe it should record thermal events and may help diagnose

What OS is it by the way?
 
When you switch it on first thing, run taskmanager and let it run till it freezes then look to see if there is anything software wise that is drawing too much memory resources.

I had the same thing with AVG, it was, not everytime, doing a scan 2mins after starting and using 3GB memory and freezing everything.
 
Tobers said:
Ta. Nothing evident in event viewer, but I'll check it again after the next crash.

It's running Windows XP. Not overclocked - everything left as standard.
Click to expand...

Doesn't seem like a thermal problem then, I would agree with admirable then, their maybe a process that runs when first booted and is hogging cpu and/or memory, or their is a physical problem with the memory modules.
 
I had a similar problem with a PC a couple of years ago. The advice I found out the time was to run "memtest86" as RAM tends to be the weak link. I did find that one stick of RAM had bad sectors, so replaced that & it did the trick.
 
or grab a free program like core temp to check the cpu temps, but most likely sounds like memory or software causing the pc to freeze. Generally a cpu temp issue would cause a reboot not a freeze
 
ppp said:
or grab a free program like core temp to check the cpu temps, but most likely sounds like memory or software causing the pc to freeze. Generally a cpu temp issue would cause a reboot not a freeze
Click to expand...

Or try a bootable memory test program and kill two birds with one stone. You can see if its a software problem if the memory test runs and runs. If its a memory issue the memory test program will diagnose it
 
Howdy - thanks for the responses. I've got the CoreTemp app and it shows all 4 cores running well within tolerances. There are no significant CPU using apps running when it crashes - it's usually just Firefox and Thunderbird, or sometimes nothing at all - CPU usage is down around 5% so I dont think it's an application issue.

Memtest is the next thing to try - I'll download that and give it a go.

It seems that there are numerous issues of this sort reported on the web with the i7 processor and no single cause so far identified.

The other thing I could try is to have Event Viewer open all the time whilst waiting for the thing to crash, but looking at previous eventviewer logs there's nothing untoward on there.
 
If your running Windows 7 there is a memory test application built on, give that whirl too.
 
If XP you could always try Pressing F8 during boot up then select 'Last Known Good Configuration (your most recent settings that worked)'

That has solved some issues with software that has crashed my system.

Another is to do a system restore, try booting in safe mode to see id it is a process.


My dads PC had a similar problem but it would only boot for 6-8mins then drop out.
The fix...
I stripped it and cleaned the inside and all contacts. Problem solved.

Phil
 
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