Frozen Pc

Wormwood

I've found myself volunteering to fix my father in laws somewhat dead pc.
I've not had much time to date but the problem seems to be two things firstly on boot the display fails to come on. I've tried swapping diplays and gefx card, the problem still occurrs.

Second problem it's started to freeze, totally locking up only a power off or reset will restart it at which point the display doesnt come on until about the tenth attempt.

The pc is old like prolly 4 or 5 years I guess it's and AMD XP1800 with 512 of generic ram and a nasty looking generic mobo.

Any ideas other than buy a new pc greatfully received

Cheers

Wormwood

Sledgehammer70

Try hitting F8 on boot, and run in VGA mode, your refresh rate might be to high for the monitor, which would cause a black screen boot. Once you reset it in VGA mode reboot normally. As for frezzing.. lets get the display working first

Wormwood

Sledgehammer70 wrote:

Try hitting F8 on boot, and run in VGA mode, your refresh rate might be to high for the monitor, which would cause a black screen boot. Once you reset it in VGA mode reboot normally. As for frezzing.. lets get the display working first

Thanks but I've already tried it using a different monitor, surely this would of covered it? I'll give it a go thou

Sledgehammer70

Different Monitors isn't always the fix. But usually it is lets hope it is the VGA settings...

muddocktor

That computer is old enough to where you might have some components like the capacitors going bad. Have you looked at the motherboard and noticed whether the capacitor tops might be bulged or burst or the capacitors are leaking?

Wormwood

I haven't noticed any problems with the capictors but i'll do a more thorough check. I made sure to run through the help checklist before I posted heh, though I haven't run memtest yet due to a shortage of floppies.

I tried running in VGA mode and this was fine on the first boot, but now the machine will only boot in safe mode, where it seems to run fine and stablely. . The PC ran for a good four hours in safe mode without freezing up. It was having issues with Macfee internet security package on it, which had apparently been partially uninstalled, I've removed this fully now I hope.

So any ideas on how to get it out of safe mode and running normally, it currently freezes on the windows splash screen or gets to desktop where it reboot cycles until its turned off.

Help! hehe

profdlp

The chief difference between Safe Mode and a normal Windows boot is that Safe Mode doesn't load all the extra stuff you normally get.

Try going to Start>>Run, type in msconfig, then go to the Startup tab and uncheck everything. Reboot and see if Windows will start normally. If it does, add the unchecked items back in one at a time until it hangs again. If that happens you'll know that the last one you re-enabled is the culprit.

Sledgehammer70

Evil process but should find the problem

Wormwood

Well the good news is i've checkedthe capacitors and they're fine.

The bad news is i've run selective and diagnostic start ups even manually gone through ever program in start up and un ticked it and it still either fails to get past the windows splash screen or reboots shortly after going to desk top. It still works fine in safe mode.

Bizarrely Mcafee still shows in the start up programs list even though its been uninstalled.

profdlp

Run Memtest-86 for a few hours. Your RAM is probably fine, but the test will tell us a lot no matter what the result. If the computer runs for hours and hours with no problem from a boot disc we will have narrowed it down to a software problem. If not, we'll take a look at the hardware end of things, most likely beginning with the PSU.