Ok heres the deal. I'm in military intelligence in the U.S. Army. I just recently built a computer. Its been giving me all kinds of problems. Everthing from video problems, to sound problems, to LAN problems. I managed to fix all the bugs except one. My computer locks up every once in a while, well, more often than not. It doesn't lock up if I don't do anything or use it. Now, thats fine except I like to USE my PC every so often. Imagine that! Well, I tried to install new drivers for my video card. I tried running a thorough ScanDisk, but it locked up while the test was running. I also tried running a Burn-In Test, but it locked up doing that too. If anyone can help me, I will be extremely obliged.

Here is what my PC consists of:
1 K7-2007 Slot A motherboard
1 750Mhz AMD Athlon Processor
1 128MB PC133 SDRAM
1 20.7 GB Western Digital HDD
1 TNT2 Ultra Graphics Card
1 Sound Blaster Live Sound Card
1 Edimax Fast Ethernet Adapter 10/100M
1 50x Acer CD 650P CD ROM

Someone please help me......

Originally posted by Armydawg54:
Ok heres the deal. I'm in military intelligence in the U.S. Army.

Must... resist... urge... to... wisecrack... http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif
I just recently built a computer. Its been giving me all kinds of problems. Everthing from video problems, to sound problems, to LAN problems. I managed to fix all the bugs except one. My computer locks up every once in a while, well, more often than not. It doesn't lock up if I don't do anything or use it. Now, thats fine except I like to USE my PC every so often. Imagine that! Well, I tried to install new drivers for my video card. I tried running a thorough ScanDisk, but it locked up while the test was running. I also tried running a Burn-In Test, but it locked up doing that too. If anyone can help me, I will be extremely obliged.

Argh. These ones are so tough. I recently had something like this myself on a new PC, took weeks to diagnose and turned out to be a bad motherboard. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/frown.gif

A few things to try:

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Try to diagnose the problems by simplifying the system, removing any peripherals that aren't strictly needed, to see if the problem goes away. Perhaps the Ethernet card, and the sound card, which often cause troubles.
Look for "yellow splats", as Paleo Pete so aptly called them, in the Device Manager.
Check for new drivers for the chipset for your motherboard. That could be the issue here. Check the web site for the mobo and chipset makers.
Try to look for patterns, is there anything that specifically causes the lockups?
Double-check the jumpers and make sure you aren't accidentally overclocking the CPU or bus.
Try re-seating the CPU and memory.
Check to make sure the CPU fan is running and the system is staying cool...
[/list=a]
Hope that helps, and let us know how it goes.

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Charles M. Kozierok
Webslave, The PC Guide (http://www.PCGuide.com)
Comprehensive PC Reference, Troubleshooting, Optimization and Buyer's Guides...
Note: Please reply to my forum postings here on the forums. Thanks.

In addition to charles's ideas, if you are running windows 98, you might try to go to the run line and run "sfc" and see if that utility will work, or also you could do scandisk from a boot disk, and makesure you type in command "scandisk /all" from command prompt. This is just in case it is not a hardware issue.

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Joe Redd
MCP

Well, guys, thanks alot for your help. I think I found out what the problem was. I let my friend try to install all the software. Little did I know, he went into the BIOS and started changing some of the settings. I didn't know he had done that, so I grabbed the manual for my motherboard and went through each and every setting in the BIOS. I must've changed about five or six settings. I can't remember what they are now, but it fixed it. I no longer have problems with the system locking up. I really appreciate your help. If I have any other problems, I'll be sure to come back and let you all know. Thanks again.
Armydawg54