Pc Freezes After Login....

[718Young]

Good evening everyone...

My pc has been freezing up for the past three days, sometimes its after i log in under my profile (i have 5) sometimes its before the profile menu even loads. It is very temperamental... I can access the adminr log-in in safe mode. There, I ran nod32 and nothing came up. i did a regcleaner and nothing too suspicious came up.

There are times in which i can't log-in in safe mode under any profile, it just freezes.

Prior to these vexing moments, a blue screen came up and said windows had to shut down.... physical memory and page dumping was mentioned.

I turned off page dumping thought that would do it, no success...

i ran the hijack app and didn't see anything suspicious in the log...(i didn't get it reviewed by a pro though)

I can't tell if this is a virus, hardware, or a corrupt file. So now i'm here... Thank you all in advanced for your help...

Dell 2.80 processor, 1 gig ram 250hd WinXp media center 2005 ed.

[Pete_C]

That it occurs in both normal and safe mode and in all profiles and often before you login would to me indicate a hardware problem.

Presumably you already have gone to control panel => system => advanced => startup and recovery => settings

Uncheck restart on system failure

check send admin alert

check create a log

Also presumably you have already gone to my computer, right click and chosen "manage" and checked the event viewer system logs to see if anything is indicated. (It would have a red x by the event )

If not do these things now.

Now lets assume it is a freeze and not a system error ( a system error is when something causes windows to lock up; the hardware on your computer is still working just fine but windows has crashed and won't respond. ).

There are two basic categories of freezes. One is the CPU and the other is the Video card.

If the video card freezes, you may get a black screen or you may get the last frame it processed displayed until it restarts. But the key here is that while you cannot see any changes on the monitor, you can still affect the computer with the keyboard. If you use the keyboards shortcuts of Windows key , U key , Enter , S key , Enter you will shut down the computer (or win , u, enter, r, enter to restart) . Often Ctrl+alt+del twice or repeatedly will restart it too.

If the keyboard has no effect and the only solution is to press and hold the power button on the front then either the CPU is freezing or the motherboard is not transferring data to and from it. Occasionally this can be caused by RAM also so that should not be ruled out.

Causes tend to fall into the catagories of heat , power , drivers, memory , damage.

If electronic components overheat, they will freeze up.

Generally when heat is the cuplrit the item fails, you restart and it won't start; but you wait a few minutes for it to cool and it does (sometimes the time to shutdown is long enough for it to cool off). But if you restart it before it has fully cooled it will lock up again sooner than before.

Often heat issues can be identified by opening the case and directing a box fan to blow air into the case and onto components so that they are cooler than they would normally be. Other techniques would be to constantly monitor temps (and voltages) with an application like SpeedFan.

Generally when it is a power instability, you find that it becomes more and more frequent. Often with power supply issues if it doesn't work, restarting it a couple times solves it until it locks up again. Other key symptoms of power issues tend to be drives not being detected or failure to find windows when you boot; but often it has no problem until the power supply gets hot and then it becomes unstable. At this point the motherboard safeties cut power to the CPU leaving you "locked up"

Memory issues are harder to pinpoint, but easier to troubleshoot. Just remove all but one stick of RAM and if the problem is fixed you know that one of the other sticks is the culprit. (If not try one of the other sticks alone just to be sure). The solution would be to replace the bad stick.

Then there are the device conflicts and bad devices.

These generally become apparent immediately after you attach them. So did you add new hardware just before this problem started?