Preserved Topic: Freezed weirdness

My PC is driving me mad again. It's the same old problem that's been bugging me for about two years now, but it's happening much more frequently during the last days and I'm beginning to believe that it's connected to moon phases.

I already described all this a few months ago, but since no-one was able to fins out what's wrong then, I'll just give it another try today and see if there are some other people around...

Here's what's happening: While being connected to the Internet, my whole system just freezes every now and again and won't respond to anything but the RESET button. Between the freezes may be weeks, days, or minutes, no matter if I just booted or have the computer running for hours. I already replaced the graphics card, the RAM and the modem (with an ISDN card) without any result - what else could be the reason? It's definately somehow connected to the OS in use: though it *never* happened on Win 98 (so it can't be a real hardware damage, right?), it keeps happening on Win 2000 / XP. And it isn't even a Windows 'bug', it's also happening when I'm using Linux. Strange, isn't it?

So basically I don't have a clue what's going on here and would of course be very happy about every little bit of help.

kuckus (cell #282)

Best thing I can suggest, (although possibly not much use to you) is to go back to windows98.

98se was the most stable OS that MS ever released.

You say that your problem is with w2k & xp (which is essentially 2k with fluffy bits).
These OS's address your hardware in a difernt way to 98, are more agressive, more resource hungry.
In fact, they're just plain ol' greedy.

Sorry can't be more help though.
PC's are funny things.

The thing is that Win 98 hasn't been running stable at all when I used it (though the internet worked fine then ), that's why I switched to 2000 and later to XP (still in hope to be able to fix the problem that way...). And not a single application crashed all the time I'm using 2000/XP, so it's working quite well for me - except for these weird freezes. I've also been using 98 for surfing and 2000 for everything else for a while, but having to reboot all the time kept getting on my nerves...

quote:

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PC's are funny things.

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Definately!

[This message has been edited by kuckus (edited 07-26-2002).]

Ok, that helps some.

What ISP are you with?

What I'm getting at is this:

Are you using the CD that came from the isp?
If so, try creating a Dial-Up-Connection manually.

So many ISP's have sucky dialler managers it's untrue, and it may be that simple.

[This message has been edited by Dufty (edited 07-26-2002).]

Oh, I switched the ISP a thousand times already (why can't just one be the cheapest forever?!)

[edit: I'm always setting things up manually. And I even tried AOL for a month, but I didn't expect it to help, so it didn't.]

[This message has been edited by kuckus (edited 07-26-2002).]

I hope I'm wrong, but it sounds to me like it might be a problem with your motherboard
it could be that it's either on the way out, or there's some other piece of hardware that it doesn't like

one of my old boxes used to to that sort of thing with increasing frequency until it just refused to boot one day - still it gave me a good excuse to get a new machine, so there's a positive side to it all

hate to be a harbinger of doom, but hope this helps
I:.

someoneInverse: I have been thinking about that, too, but if it was the motherboard, how could the problem not occur on Windows 98?

Due to the way in which the OS addresses the MOBO resources.

NT/2K/XP are 'agressive'

Does that mean that there is no way of having my motherboard work together with Win 2000/Xp and Linux, no matter which other hardware is installed? Or would it rather mean that one of my computer's components is accessed in a way it doesn't support and therefore causes system crashs from time to time? If that's the case, is there a way of finding out which component it is? Then I could at least replace it (if it really isn't possible to make Windows address it in a way it can deal with, that is).

What still isn't clear to me is the fact that the PC only crashes while I'm connected to the internet, since I'm absolutely sure that it's not the modem. But maybe I have got two damaged COM ports .And which other components are left? Nothing but the CPU and the CD drives / hard disks.

kuckus (cell #282)

I reckon that if this is a hardware problem, it would be just one component that sporadically causes the trouble when it's accessed - possibly the modem if it only happend whenyoure online

try searching google groups for stuff about incompatibilities with your mobo and other hardware - there's bound to be at least someone withthe same problems as yourself especially if your box is a couple of years old

hth
I:.

Worth checking the hardware compatibility list.

Searching Google groups for my VIA chipset turned up a driver that's supposed to prevent the computer from freezing while copying large files from one to another harddrive while playing music... not *exactly* a description of my problem, but I'll try to install it and see if the machine freezes again during the next days anyways.

Thanks for your help so far!

kuckus (cell #282)

Since you have a motherboard based on VIA chipset, you should install the latest VIA 4in1 drivers (they may solve your problem), which can be obtained from: http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=2

I've had XP freeze on me about three or four times in the 3 months that I've had it. It hasn't happened for a while, and it was so infrequent that I just don't worry about it. It's nothing compared to the trouble that Win98 gave me. (Except for this can't-stay-turned-off problem.)

Symptoms: Out of the blue, everything freezes, including the mouse. Holding down the power button to reset is the only thing that gets a response.

mr.maX: Thanks for the tip, I'm downloading the drivers right now...

Slime: That's exactly what's happening with my computer when I'm online.

kuckus (cell #282)

I'm nearly always online, so I'm not sure if it was related to that.

I'm using a Thinkpad T22 (IBM laptop). You can probably find various information about the hardware on this laptop and compare it to yours, though I wouldn't be surprised if it was a software issue, at least in my case...

New drivers didn't help, it just froze again. *sigh*

Does anybody have an idea how else the problem could be fixed? Is it possible to find out which component is causing the crashes and make Windows access it in a less 'aggressive' way?

(BTW, did I really enter "freezed" into that topic name box? Awww...]

kuckus (cell #282)

Go through each hardware component in the device manager. Go to the properties of each one, then to the resources tab. See if windows is listing any conflicts, becuase 9 times out of 10 it doesn't tell you aobut them.

Koan 63, written on the wall of cell number 250:
Those who Believe
Can
Those who Try
Do
Those who Love
Live