Random PC Lockups
My colleagues PC, running Vista Ultimate, quad core processor, 4GB ram etc has recently developed a fault where by the screen turns off and the PC appears to be on, however, pressing caps lock or numlock does not change the lights on the keyboard - indicating to me that the PC has frozen.
Quite why the screen goes into power save I don't know.
The only way to bring it back to life is a hard reboot, even waiting an hour (as my colleague did when going to lunch!) nothing changes.
I looked in the event viewer, as I now have 3 times where it has happened which I know about - there's nothing before which indicates a problem.
The PC is used for publishing but it's rarely strained, when it died today she had Outlook, Firefox and Indesign open - nothing was being processed or anything heavy.
Does anyone have any ideas?!
Quite why the screen goes into power save I don't know.
The only way to bring it back to life is a hard reboot, even waiting an hour (as my colleague did when going to lunch!) nothing changes.
I looked in the event viewer, as I now have 3 times where it has happened which I know about - there's nothing before which indicates a problem.
The PC is used for publishing but it's rarely strained, when it died today she had Outlook, Firefox and Indesign open - nothing was being processed or anything heavy.
Does anyone have any ideas?!
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Here's the current situation:
* Looking in the event viewer for events prior to the machine freezing which would explain it. Nothing out of the ordinary, all information messages and nothing you wouldn't see at other times.
* Updated the graphics drivers from NVida, it now has 19-August-09 drivers or there abouts.
* A new DVI cable (as we have some spare ones) and it was easy to eliminate.
* Memtest 86 - This ran for about 5 seconds then tried to boot the machine, very odd. So, I removed 1 stick of RAM from 1 slot and tried the test again, this ran for around half hour then I stopped it as nothing odd had happened. I tried it again with the same stick of RAM and it failed in the same way, so I thought I had sorted it.
Unfortunately the same thing has happened again this morning so my memory removal didn't solve it.
I've had PCs freeze in the past but never the monitor die straight away, this seems most odd.
Just a shot in the dark.....sometimes it leads somewhere.
Also, can I run some kind of app which would give me reports of the temperature and I could see if heat buildup correlated with shutdowns?
But yea, you wonder about heat in general. I think I used Everest to track the heat. It logged temps right up to the point where the computer crashed. There are others.....PC Wizard is another.
Hopefully this sorts it, time will tell I guess.
Thanks for the help mtrox and kryyst