Widows XP freezing up?
 

My new computer is locking up and freezing during basic activities, surfing the net, reading tfp etc. Any thoughts? Is this a decent pc?

Spec's
Dimension B110 Intel® Celeron® D Processor 325 (2.53 GHz, 533 FSB)


Memory 1GB Dual Channel DDR SDRAM at 400MHz
1GB4


Video Cards Integrated Intel® Extreme Graphics 2


Hard Drive 160GB Ultra ATA/100 7200RPM Hard Drive
160


XP Home Edition

get adaware from download.com.... run it. then run your virus scanner (i hope you have a virus scanner?). it sounds like you just got alot of adware/spyware and maybe even a virus.


your computer is awesome, soo it has nothing to do with that... all you gotta do is clean it up

Will run spy-bot, virus scans run clean.

Does it ever lock up just sitting there powered up? (with standby disabled)

Have you tweaked any settings or changed any of the hardware?

You might want to run a <a href="http://www.memtest86.com/">thorough memory test</a>. Complete freezes on a recent system are a bit unusual.

This time of year I have to ask, what's the room temperature? Does it lock up as quickly after just booting vs. having been powered up for hours? How about case exhaust temps? Hot, warm, or no air movement?

i would suggest also running adaware, just to be thorough.
i routinely run them one after the other.
one will, often times, find stuff the other did not.

fairly important question: how long has it been since you last defragmented your hard drive?

if your hd looks like swiss cheese, it can greatly impede performance.
when your files are split up among many different locations... your computer must skip around to find and assemble all the pieces it takes to view a pic, listen to song, run a program, etc.
it is sort of like a schizophrenic mind struggling to complete a thought.

There's air moving from both fans. Don't know exhaust temps or how to check them?

I did download Adaware, are there things I shouldn't delete? I find it somewhat confusing. It found mostly tracking info. so I deleted all.

It's does seem to be better though, It hasn't locked up in a few days.

Thanks for all your input and advice.

With the power off, check and see if the memory modules are seated property? Reboot your PC, after desktop is loaded, bring up Task Manger right away (Ctrl-Alt-Del) and leave it visible while you launch applications.

Do you run CPU/graphics intensive programs? Have you installed any new hardware/software? I had a system lockup and I found that the multi-card reader driver was causing the antivirus/spyware program (BitDenfender) to launch multiple instances of explorer.exe.

Under Task Manager - "Processes", it showed 2000+ tasks being run and eventurally it froze my system completely. I had to temporarily disable the antivirus, uninstalled the card reader driver before I was able to use my PC. Luckily I found an updated version of the driver and installed it. It doesn't cause BitDefender to lock up the computer anymore.