At my wit's end (random lockups)

J

JimFromTexas

Geek Trainee
I'm hoping someone here can help me diagnose a problem I've been having with my computer for months. The problem is one of random lockups. It has happened at the windows login screen, while idling, browsing the web, playing a game. There seems to be no pattern to it.

What's more preplexing is that during this time I've replaced virtually every piece of hardware in the machine, yet the issue persists. All that remain since the problem started well over a year ago are the monitors, speakers, and hard drives. I recently replaced the motherboard, cpu, ram and PSU.

So, where do I start? Have I just been extremely unlucky?

Lockups may or may not happen in a day. I've had them happen within 15 minutes of restarting (be it from an overnight powerdown, or from restarting following a lockup), or not at all during an entire day of use though that's rare. Today it has locked up 3 times on me.

My previous setup was an ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe with an Athlon X2 and Corsair ram. Eventually it just stopped booting altogether, that is when I replaced the CPU/MoBo/RAM. A month or two later when the lockups hadn't ceased, I replaced the PSU. Previous was a 520W ePower PSU. That was no help.

Anyway, that's the hardware I'm not using anymore. Here's my current setup:

Motherboard: ASUS Striker II Extreme
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550
RAM: I forget the brand.. Corsair DDR3, 4GB total (2x2GB) I think
PSU: Corsair TX750W (excessive, I know)
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB mfd by XFX I think
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium

I also installed a cooling fan called a Rosewill Z4.
That's as good as I can do without cracking it open, let me know if I do need to crack it open for additional info.

Also, I ran SpeedFan 4.4 to get temps and such. Here's what it tells me:

Fan speeds:
Fan1: 2077
Fan2: 1210
Fan5: 1880
PWR Fan: 0
Fan1: 3068

Temps:
GPU: 53C
Temp1: 26C
Temp2: 42C
Temp3: 22C

Voltage:
Vcore1: 0.98V
Vcore2: 3.31V
+3.3V: 0.00V
+5V: 5.03V
+12V: 11.97V
-12V: -16.72V
-5V: -5.36V
+5V: 5.03V
Vbat: 3.25V

That +3.3 is odd. I'll reboot after posting to confirm that in BIOS and come back. Thanks for any help. :)
 
Okay, I took note of the BIOS temp/fan speed/voltage info:

Voltages:

Vcore 1.15
CPU PLL 1.52
CPU VTT 1.12
Memory 1.66
NB Core 1.32
SB Core 1.48
DDR Termination 0.81
3.3V 3.31
5V 5.02
12V 11.96

Temps:
CPU 33
M/B 34
NB 47
SB 52

Fan Speeds:
CPU: 2088
CHA_FAN1: 1209
PWR: 1885
OPT1: 3034

One other thing I forgot to mention was that twice since I replaced the mobo/cpu/ram, a lockup has occurred following a particularly awful screeching/grinding sound which lasted for a couple seconds. Upon reboot when that happened, the BIOS settings had been wiped/reverted to default and the system time had been reset to Jan 1, 2000 in one case, and some time in 2003 the other time.

One last thing, and oddity, is that both hardware setups took longer than normal to startup. A long delay apparently initializing USB. With the current machine, one of two things will happen: either the windows login screen will appear quickly but the keyboard and mouse will be unresponsive, or after the windows logo there will be a black screen for a minute or two however once the windows login screen appears the keyboard and mouse are immediately responsive. I haven't timed it but it seems to be as though the time between powering on the machine and when the keyboard/mouse first become responsive is the same. It's just a question of whether the login screen shows early or not. O.o
 
Hi,

Current PSU is Corsair TX750W.
I have run memtest+ from an ubuntu liveCD a couple months ago and there were no issues there either.

Today I have disconnected all my USB devices except the mouse and keyboard. The startup issue went away, so I'm assuming one of those USB devices was causing that. Also, no hangs so far.. *crosses fingers*

I'm pretty sure I've tried this before to no avail, but I should have tried it again more recently.

The devices I had connected were:

- One of those external/internal hard drive mounts. Lets you connect an internal hard drive via USB. It was powered off though still connected.
- WD USB hard drive
- Logitech G7 mouse battery charger

I had some work to do today so I can't test much more, but so far it seems to be ok. Any ideas which of those devices might be the culprit? I'll try them one by one later to find out.

Thanks.
 
JimFromTexas said:
Okay, that didn't fix it. Just had a lockup... argh.
Click to expand...
Try another overnight run of Memtest86+ and see if you catch any errors. Also inspect the motherboard and other components for bad capacitors, which can certainly cause instability. Finally, you can try running a live Linux distro (from CD, flash, whatever) for a day or so and see if you get any lockups then. At least that would prove whether it's a Windows problem or a hardware one.
 
Thanks for the advice, Anti-Trend. I'll try that out and see how it goes. Not sure what I'll do in linux for a day though.. guess I can just leave it and see what happens.

Will report back when I have more info.
 
JimFromTexas said:
Not sure what I'll do in linux for a day though.. guess I can just leave it and see what happens.
Click to expand...
You can surf the web, watch some movies, maybe play some games... Not sure what you normally do on your computer, but Linux is a full-featured OS. :)

Another nice thing is that if you do end up seeing something weird from within Linux, you can run the 'dmesg' command, which displays the kernel logs held in memory. That can be invaluable for troubleshooting, as the error messages are usually quite specific. Of course if you have no problems at all in Linux, it could very well mean that the problem wasn't your hardware at all... :O
 
Anti-Trend said:
You can surf the web, watch some movies, maybe play some . Not sure what you normally do on your computer, but Linux is a full-featured OS. :)
Click to expand...

Hehe yeah, I know, I was kiddin. I used linux exclusively for a couple years. But my usage has morphed over the years to where I'm mostly using my computer for either gaming or occasionally doing some work from home which involves a ton of windows-only software. :-/

So, I ran memtest86+ over the night and when I woke up it was still going. It got to 25% into test 8 and everything seems to be ok there. I started up the ubuntu live cd before I left.

With regards to the OS, I've used XP, Windows 7 Ultimate beta & RC, and after replacing the mobo/cpu/etc installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Home Premium. The problem has been consistent throughout.

Something else I haven't mentioned is that putting the machine to sleep is erratic. Once in a while it will wake successfully, but the vast majority of the time it will refuse to wake. As a result I've taken to shutting down the machine each night.

Anyway, hopefully I can uncover something interesting when I get home tonight.
 
Well I let Ubuntu sit idle throughout the day and it never locked up. I then booted back into Windows when I got home (about 7 hours ago now) and it still stubbornly refused to lock up.

Today has been a good day and yet a bad day because I'm still no closer to diagnosing the issue. I'll keep trying to have it lock up on me. Somehow..
 
Hi, you could have stability issues, have you tried running prime95 on your system?
You could also try updating to the latest bios revision as you've mentioned it takes the bios a while to detect and set the frequency of a few controllers on the motherboard.
 
Well the last couple of days have been interesting. I've been running BOINC in Linux for about 18 hours a day, letting it tax the hell out of my CPU and GPU. Not once did it hang in Linux. Twice it has hung in after I had rebooted into Windows, but a couple days it did not at all. :-/

Low sample size yet, still collecting data.

Thanks for the help guys, we'll get this yet. I'll try a BIOS update as you recommend Bobby.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top