Computer hangs for no reason

Hi all, wonder if you can help?

I have a fairly old machine that I have been using pretty much constantly for about 5 years. I have moved about 4 times during that time and its moved with me, each time its worked fine and everything has been great. Shes been like a faithful old friend. However, on my last move, about 2 years ago, things started to go awry.

Firstly, the hard drive crashed with no hope of recovery, blue screen of death, couldn't re-install windows etc. I replaced it with an old hard drive which crashed about a year before (and seemingly had a similar problem) and that worked fine with the other drive as a slave. All was good for about a year, and then it all got a bit unstable. Randow freezing, system errors left right and centre, blue screen etc...tried ad-ware removal, spy-bot, norton antivirus, complete format and re-install, nothing worked.

I have recently purchased a whole new hard drive, with no slave as niether of the other two drives is recognised by the BIOS now (strangely!) and have also replaced the IDE cables as they were statring to fray at the contact points.

The new drive has a fresh new copy of XP Pro installed, along with Office 2003, Media Player 10, Acrobat, Real Player, ad-aware, spy-bot, belkin wireless networking software, bittorrent, utorrent, and thats it! I did have norton antivirus installed but it was causing all sorts of problems with icons not loading after logon (dont know why) and system has been better since removal.

Now it still hangs, and I cant figure out why. No yellow icons on device manager, no viruses having checked with an online version, no ad-ware, no spyware.

Its a completely random hang as well, sometimes after a few minutes (particularly if using internet explorer with several windows open) and sometimes I can leave it for 48 hours with no hang.

I have noticed that if I take the side off it seems to last longer. And the system temp tends to be up around the 140 degree mark, and it seems to work better if it stays below that, but there is no reason for it to be so high. The fan on the heatsink works fine, and there are two other fans in the sytaem one front bottom, one back top so there plenty of airflow, expecially now as it sits open most of the time to avoid the hanging problem.

Does anyone have any thouughts or suggestions? I am buying a new machine soon but I would like to keep this one up and runnign for now instead of constantly have to fudge it so it works for a bit longer.

Heat is a definite possibility and an open case isn't the best solution as a well vented case needs to be closed in order to "Flow".

Anyway have you cleaned out all the dust? Perhaps remove the RAM and Graphics Card and clean the pins and slots with alcohol and air.

Cleaning and reapplying the thermal paste on the CPU is also a good idea after all these years.

At 140F/60C things are a bit unstable although most systems will tolerate temps up to 70C/158F before failing.



I would suspect heat and hardware but if you want to review software possibilities:



Check your Event Viewer via Administrative Tools.

Open the System as well as Application tabs and look for red X errors that coincide with your problem. Details here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308427




Also if your blue screen is showing a memory dump do the following:



Go to start | search (type in) .dmp
Note the location of your .dmp files.
If no .dmp files check for minidump.
Remember this location and the path that leads to it.

Then:

1) Download and install the

Debugging Tools from Microsoft

All you need do is download and install this. Make no attempt to start or run it.

2) Download and install this

debugwiz

This is a DOS based batch file that will command the above Microsoft Tools.

3) Open the Wiz & Browse to, or paste in the path to, your .dmp file.

4) After the Wiz creates a Text document attach it back to this thread.


If you are looking for links on how to interpret this data for yourself try here first:

http://www.wd-3.com/archive/registercontext.htm



By the way getting rid of Norton was a great idea. That software is incredibly troublesome. Do not buy nor install Norton products.