Freezing issues...Not Hard Drive

[patriotreview]

Guys I have a 800 Duron that I have had for years. I have an Elements Motherboard with 256MB Ram.

In the past few months it has begun to freeze up alot.

At first I thought it was Hard Drive issues because I had used HDs in the system.

However I tried several used ones (all with the same result) and finally got a new 80GB 7200 Hard Drive and it has the exact same symptoms!

Here's what it does:
When I first boot up after it has been shut down, within about 5 minutes it totally locks up.

I then may have to reboot 2 or 3 more times with similar results (SOMETIMES WHEN I RESTART DURING THIS TIME THE SYSTEM DOESNT EVEN INITIATE AND I HAVE TO SHUT IT OFF TOTALLY FOR A COUPLE MINUTES)
THEN however, once booted around the 4th time, it works fine and can play for hours without issue.

I am using win98se also by the way.

Well now I want to give it to my brother in law (its a pretty decent system once it stops Freezing!) but I would love to give it to him fixed.

Can someone clue me in as to what this might be since I DONT think it is the hard drive. ((COULD MY RAM BE GOING BAD?)) (Mobo having issues?) (Maybe my processor???) ---

I think it must be Ram since it eventually always ends up working fine ( I would think a mobo problem or a hot processor would not just begin working right after several reboots) -- BUT I DONT know if RAM can cause the things I just described....help???

[vidster]

You can test your memory with This

[patriotreview]

I used that recently and it ran for HOURS! **I just read where it never finishes....but I dont remember seeing any errors detected....

I have it on a disk somewhere so I will try and run it again, if it is not Ram though, what else could it be?
t

[patriotreview]

Does anyone think this could be the Processor?

I wonder if it got hot somewhere along the line and this is the results...?

anyone?
t

[Play_The_0dds]

could be any of your hardware going bad.....could be heat, if your system is a bit older the fan may not be doing as well as it used to, and the fins on the heatsink could be full of crud, make sure all the pci, agp,...just what ever is still firmly in the slots, i have removed all the cards and ram and used a eraser to clean the contacts on many machines and had astounding results. alot of ram that test bad will work correctly after doing this too. if you are overclocking, or have some video caching options in the bios set wrong you will reboot. bad ide cables cause reboot. the motherboard could have some capacitors going bad, power supply could be on it's last days....

[djlonboy]

Hey Patriotreview, thats really weird - I have a computer with virtually identical spec (except my duron's a 1.2gig) and it does EXACTLY the same thing (see my posting under the Win 98... section) Ive found that taking out the ram and putting it back in seems to solve the problem temporarily... I also thought it was my slave HDD to begin with and nearly bought a new one, but I also discovered it does it even when the drive isn't attached...

I've had a browse on the net, and it looks like it could be a RAM problem, but I would like to know a bit more before I go out buying loads of new hardware... Have you had any joy with yours since your post?

[patriotreview]

I plan on soon buying a new processor and fan for this system and I think I believe this is it.....

From what I have determined, only a processor that has gotten hot at one time could cause these types of funky sporadic actions and then suddenly work correctly.....?

Ill let you know.
t

[djlonboy]

Yeah, I did a little experiment last night + swapped the ram from my other computer (should have done this before really!). Anyhow the long of the short of it was it still froze up (although slightly differently this time) so I think you're right about the processor...