Help with my 'Puter freezing a resetting itself

As I say above, the bloody thing is tempramental and sometimes just restes itself or freezes. I have gonje back to a previous good back-up, I have repaired the registry with a programme, I have removed a number of programmes and done the defrag, diskcheck thing.

I seem to recall there may be a programme that stops the thing from crashing and tells you why. Can't remember what it is called, I think I had it for my Pakard Bell many many moons ago.

Any help or suggestion greatfully recieved.

have you checked the temperature of the machine? CPU over heating is a common cause of machines just shutting down. Best bet is to open up the case and check that there is not a build up of dust on the processor and fans etc. If there is then a blast of compressed air will help. If you dont have any compressed air then a very gentle vac will do the trick too - just not at full sucking power!

I will try this when I get home. thanks

oh and if you want to monitor the temps to see if this is really the problem then you can install http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/SpeedFan--beta-Download-4103.html

ew, registry clean-up software is rank. Avoid.

Re-install the O.S, maybe a total pain in the r'se but a sure fire way to narrow it down to software or hardware fault. Or overheating.

At this time of year, often the house heating gets ramped up, and if your PC is sited over or near a hot radiator, it almost certainly is overheating. Just move it away and the problem will cease as soon as it started.

If the problem persists, do as Saint Stevo suggests. You'll get a speed bonus to soften the pain in the arse. Remember to save your important files, IE favourites and Outlook .pst files if you have any. If you still get freezing problems, it may well be a PSU, RAM problem [although usually accompanied by error window], HDD or graphics card. If it is HDD, then Win XP will suggest your drive is unstable. If the OS boots up as if nothing has happened it is almost certainly Graphics card or PSU. Substitute another graphics card if you have one, and if the problem goes away, you know what you have got. If it doesn't, you only have one other dodgy component. BTW, in my experience it is hardly ever the motherboard when it comes to a freezing OS..! But it could happen.

There you go... instant PC engineer.

I think you are referring to the event viewer?

Click start, right click my computer, click manage, click event viewer under system tools. Then I suggest you click hardware.

Could be a number of different things. Try booting into safe mode and see if things run OK in there?

Failing that you can run Memtest (http://www.memtest.org/) or take the side off of your system and see who manufacturered your hard drive. You could then run that manufacturers diagnostics on the hdd. Otherwise it could be temperature? Check to make sure your CPU fan isn't full of dust.

Anything in particular you do with your system? Anything in particular which seems to trigger it to freeze? What are you normally doing when it freezes?

Open up your processes (ctrl+alt+del) and look at the column marked CPU. See if any .exe processes are hammering the processor. Nothing in there should be running above 5 (except sytem idle which will probably be showing about 95 but ignore that). If there's anything running high then make a note of what it is and google it to see if there's a known problem with it.

Many thanks everyone for your advice. I now have some work to do. Any more probs and it's outh the door, ( and disposed of in accordance with the WEEE regulations).

On this particular PC I'm using, it has a tendency to freeze every time Nero 8 is started up. I would look into the problem, but I think it's actually behaving intelligently.

By the way, if you're going to chuck it, I know of charities that will gratefully accept the hardware [and NO, I don't mean ME].

I'll let you know what happens

I'll let you know what happens

What happened then ? the suspense is getting to me