hi am after some advice regarding my daughters pc, it keeps locking up/freezing and no matter how long you leave it it doesnt stabilise. It always needs to be rebooted. It happens when gaming online, during normal internet use and also when its just left running.

Is this likely to be a graphic card problem ? its currently got a nvidia7600lx if my memory serves me correct.


thanks

jabber

Yep, we have one like that

Gericom Humer, 3 gig Pentium 4 and 512 RAM and running XP
I know the RAM is low but the machine is really only used for Email (Outlook) a bit of Skype and some web searches

I just "hangs" with the mouse pointer not moving and no response at all from any keys. Mrs gets infuriated with it. A re-boot almost always solves the problem

Snod

think its worth throwing a newer graphics card into it ? would a more modern one fit, this pc is approx 5 yrs old

Check you have the latest drivers installed(especially for the nVidia cards), after this take a look at the event logs for clues although unless your comfortable with these, they can look like hieroglyphics. (right click 'My Computer',Manage, event logs). Hope this helps. If not PM me....

In my experience there have been a lot of hard disk drives going down with faulty sectors recently which cause these symptoms.

Annoyingly you can do things (eg re-instal) and the fault seem to go, but once Windows tries to use that sector again at a later date, the fault recurs.

The HDD health monitor doesn't always pick these up either, which is perverse. I format the drive and listen for it struggling to format some sectors and also check after format that NO sectors are bad, if either of those problems happen, then I replace the drive - once a drive starts getting some faults, its only waiting for the most inconvenient moment to go worse.

Of course it may be something else in this case but current rate for me is about 75% of these faults are HDD starting to die.

PC Check from Eurosoft will pick most hard drive faults up - some of the checks take a long time, but they are comprehensive to say the least.