In my experience, if it just locks up solid with no blue screen, or if it just randomly reboots without warning, it's likely to be a hardware problem.
Could really be anything but start by running memtest86 on it overnight. If memtest is stable then try a CPU burn in utility. Ideally you want to do this with an application that doesn't run under Windows. If you can get it to lock up under DOS/Linux then it's very likely that it has nothing to do with your Windows install. In my experience these things are most likely to be (in decreasing order of likelihood): * memory * motherboard * power supply * CPU * Windows I usually use this for the diagnostic tools: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ Ben -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Craig van Nieuwkerk Sent: Friday, 27 May 2011 10:20 AM To: ozDotNet Subject: Re: [OT] Freezing computer What does the event log say? On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 12:10 PM, Greg Keogh <[email protected]> wrote: > Folks, I recycled an 18 month old good quality computer recently, modernised > it with Windows 7 64-bit, customised it carefully to join our home office > domain and handed it over to her. She then installed her software which > includes "heavy" apps like Adobe Framemaker 9, Robohelp 7 and 8, Office > 2010. > > > > Now the machine randomly freezes solid. I've even seen it freeze just after > boot in the middle of running a robocopy.exe to a portable drive. It seems > to be completely random and unrelated to what you're doing at the time. > > > > The only way I'm aware of to diagnose this is to incrementally stop services > and uninstall apps until the problem goes away, and there is no guarantee > that you will actually find the offending component this way. This is > painstaking and would seriously interfere with my wife's work deadlines. The > randomness of the problem could also stretch the diagnosis into weeks of > wasted time. > > > > Is there any other technique I'm not aware of that can help pinpoint the > cause of the freezes on this machine? > > > > Greg This email is intended for the named recipient only. The information it contains may be confidential or commercially sensitive. If you are not the intended recipient you must not reproduce or distribute any part of this email, disclose its contents to any other party, or take any action in reliance on it. If you have received this email in error, please contact the sender immediately and delete the message from your computer.
