Cursed PC strikes again! Spontaneous shutdowns
Hello Icrontic,
recently, my cursed and foreverdomed to have low fps PC has been experiencing spontaneous freezes, followed by a noise that sounds like a remix gone wrong then completely restarts for no reason. My monitor has also been turning itself off after recieving no signal from the PC, although turning the monitor off then on again with the power button fixes that. I haven't a clue what's triggered it, or what may be causing it, and I'm even more clueless as to the solutions: Time to call in the big guns *points at Icrontic*. My only theory is, that could explain the monitor thing is that the graphics card has had a stroke or something.
I don't even know where to start, any suggestions? Or any information you require I'll do my best to supply you with it.
recently, my cursed and foreverdomed to have low fps PC has been experiencing spontaneous freezes, followed by a noise that sounds like a remix gone wrong then completely restarts for no reason. My monitor has also been turning itself off after recieving no signal from the PC, although turning the monitor off then on again with the power button fixes that. I haven't a clue what's triggered it, or what may be causing it, and I'm even more clueless as to the solutions: Time to call in the big guns *points at Icrontic*. My only theory is, that could explain the monitor thing is that the graphics card has had a stroke or something.
I don't even know where to start, any suggestions? Or any information you require I'll do my best to supply you with it.
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I have a similar problem, and have had it on multiple nvidia cards. If any type of movie/graphical thing is going through a media player, particularly Media Player Classic and VLC, while WoW is going, I get a lockup. It's not immediate, it could be hours later. But eventually, and without fail, I lose signal to the monitor or the computer freezes into an audio loop that sounds like a machine gun.
And it's not sub-par, the specs are decent, I'm just got getting the oomph I wanted, my PC doesn't get much of a difference in usual gameplay while media player is open, but admittedly I can't have it open during raids due to the fps struggling to get into double figures, even with "looks like mud" settings.
3.07Ghz Celeron D processor
2GB DDR 400MHz RAM (2x1GB modules)
160GB Harddrive (partitioned)
nvidia 7600GT (not overclocked, up-to-date)
EDIT: And if Thrax is getting the same problem, with his system you can hardly call it sub par, or at least specs related.
Harudath, from the symptoms you and Thrax described, it sounds like there is a software or resource conflict causing the lockups. My guess is that you want to listen to music in the background while playing WoW? That really shouldn't be a performance problem on a system that is capable of running XP well...
What motherboard do you have? Do you use the onboard sound card or a discrete sound card? If the sound card is discrete, what card is it?
I'd suggest trying a media player that doesn't have any visualizations active - if it still locks up, I'd lean away from suspecting the video. In that case, I'd give updated sound drivers a try, and/or back down the slider for audio acceleration by one notch on DXDIAG and see if that makes a difference.
Does he still have that Compaq/Dell/Emachines motherboard?
It's integrated sound, and all the drivers are up to date, the motherboard, now that one's tricky :P It's a rare model unfortunately, but in my planned upgrade I'm getting a new motherboard that supports just about everything out there and a 2.67GHz Core 2 Duo processor
The motherboard is a GA-8S649MF, It's the original motherboard that came with my Fujitsu-Siemens PC, but the RAM and the 7600GT are new.
EDIT: MSN messenger has been causing ALOT of problems lately too, not sure if that's a recurring factor here, Thrax?