Frequent Crashes

[Snake64_009]

Okay here is the situation. I had a Advent PC which I sold to my friend about 1 year ago. Beofre I sold it to him I remastered the PC clean and drove it over to his house and gave it to him. Beofre this I have never experienced problems with the PC. I then installed some baisc programs for him as well. Now apparently he has had crashes not so long after I gave it to him. Eventually we did another reinstall of XP due to some other problems with spyware etc. That did not stop the crashes which he continued to get and then now when I went over to do a cleanup of spyware for him etc. I did have the system crah on me twice. but no more after that. Today he just called me and said he got 4 crashes in 10 mins with the last being before the computer got to the windowx xp loading screen. And the computer was also very hot as well. The thing is earlier today he was on the PC playing a game and it was fine. I told him not to turn it back on for now.

What is causing this and how do I solve it?

 

[AND_YOU_ARE]

Have you opened up the case while its still running (either in the bios or in windows) and make sure all the fans that are installed are spinning? What are your temps. You can download speed fan and check them with that.

What is he doing when it crashes? Is it during game play or just simple 2D apps?

Have you made sure all the drivers are updated, video and any motherboard drivers? Is windows updated as well? We need a little more information on what is happening to narrow it down.

 

[Snake64_009]

Ok windows is up to date. video drivers are up to date as far as I know. Motherboard I am not sure about. The crashes happen anytime from games to Macromedia to just logging on. I have nto opend the case to check it (don't know why I didn't try that in the first place) so I will do that when I next go to his house. Is there anything else I can do while there?

 

[AND_YOU_ARE]

Download Speed Fan to a usb flash drive and take it over, incase it crashed before you can download it on his pc. Install it and check the temps for the hard drives, cpu and motherboard. If they are high then the pc might be over heating. Once the pc is running, open up the case and make sure every fan is spinning.

One more thing I could think of was that you could download Knoppix. Its live cd with linux on it, that you pop in your drive, and you boot off of that. You can boot off of knoppix and run a video file or anything else and see if the pc crashes. Do this if its not a fan or over heating issue.

 

[Snake64_009]

Ok I will do that this week but where can I get a download for the Speed Fan and Knoppix?

Is it SpeedFan 4.32?

 

[AND_YOU_ARE]

KNOPPIX Linux Live CD

Download SpeedFan 4.32 - SpeedFan - a small application that shows you fan speed, voltage and chip temerature. - Softpedia

 

[Snake64_009]

Ok thanks. Ill let you know the results hopefully by the end of the week. If not it will be next week.

 

[Snake64_009]

This Knoppix thing, do i have to download the individual files? If so, I will not be able to do it as it will take too long with the time I have this week. I will be going round to my friend's house tomorrow and do the speedfan and visual checks. Anything else I could do while I am there? And is there any other way to get Knoppix quicker and easier?

 

[AND_YOU_ARE]

Knoppix is a cd sized image file. If you have access to broad band internet, then thats where you would want to download it from. Unless you know some one who already has it on cd or dvd.

 

[Snake64_009]

ok speedfan gave the results below in my screenshot. The HD0 reading is wrong (i had it above 200 once!!!). It feels nothing like that, more like 40 max. I did a restart and it gave me a more realistic value of 40C. I checked the cpu fan and it was working fine, the PSU fan which also was working fine. I could not find any other fans in the case.

Now sorry to sound like a noob but how do i put knoppix on a cd? I did it but it did not boot and i checked the boot order as well and it is cd first. I just put on the big iso file onto the cd via nero. Am i doing something wrong or missing more files? I could not find out from the site what needs to be put on the cd. Also mero had to finalize it, could this be the problem?

What do i do now apart from getting this knoppix working.