F'ing PC keeps crashing

[Pondlife]

I know this has prob been posted before (even by me) but I'm too p'ssed off to search.

An XP machine of mine keeps crashing for no obvious reason. i.e. It's not always at the same point booting up or running a particular prog. Are there any utils that I can download that will monitor things like CPU temp, memory status etc or software logging that can show the last think accessed before crashing?

Any help appreciated.

Cheers

PL

 

[DimPrawn]

When you say crash, do you mean locks solid, spontaneous reboot or blue screen or application error on the screen?

 

[tim123]

Do you still get blue screen.

I haven't seen one since I got XP

tim

 

[The Clown Beater]

That's because it's turned off by default. It just reboots.

 

[Pondlife]

No, it just shuts down or hangs. Found a previous thread that pointed towards a CPU monitor and it's just over heating. Will take the dyson to it tomorrow.

 

[MrsGoof]

Check your memory. Memtest

 

[Mordac]

I know this has prob been posted before (even by me) but I'm too p'ssed off to search.

An XP machine of mine keeps crashing for no obvious reason. i.e. It's not always at the same point booting up or running a particular prog. Are there any utils that I can download that will monitor things like CPU temp, memory status etc or software logging that can show the last think accessed before crashing?

Any help appreciated.

Cheers

PL

Asus do one (called Probe, iirc), but I assume it only works with Asus boards.

 

[_V_]

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Sorry, I'll get my coat......

 

[BoredBloke]

I'd run memtest on it. Leave it running this overnight and check the results. That way you can at least rule out memory problems. If it fails and you have two mem sticks, try taking one out and repeat. You should then be able to determine if one or both have faults.

You can get things which monitor the temp of the CPU. Most of the boards I have had have a utility somewhere on their drivers disk which could allow you to monitor this. However, as a simple fix, I'd look at getting a few fans into the box and possibly refitting the heat sink on the processor with some termal paste also. They are cheap and may fix the problem.

It might also be an idea to checlk out your video card. If you have an onboard video as well as the video card, try running on that. Or you could consider buying a dirt cheap low end video card to test it with.

Another thing you could check is your power supply. If you have a pc drawing a lot of power due to a hefty graphics card, plenty of drives and USB devices pulling power from the box, it could be that your power supply is not up to it. Try unplugging a few bits and running it to see if it stops.

Presumably you have applied all the updates from MS and scanned it for spyware etc. When scanning for spyware, I always install at least 2 scanners, usually adaware (or whatever its called) and spybot. Test it with both.