The kids pc has developed a serious fault.

You can switch it on, log in and it will boot up ok. However it seems to then “freeze” in that it will not take any input from the mouse or the keyboard, so you cant do anything with it?? It started doing this a few days ago after about half an hour of operation but now it does it as soon as it has booted up.

It has MSE as its virus protection.

Could the kids have deleted something?

Help please!! 🙁

Check vent, fans and the likes for dust. They don’t like getting hot and will stop or switch off if this is the case.

Its not an overheating problem, the machine and monitor run fine and dont cut out.

ps its a desktop machine

Its not an overheating problem, the machine and monitor run fine and dont cut out.

Well the monitor will run fine it’s not part of the PC and the bits inside the machine can still spin and wurr away even if overheating.

if you press F1 as it’s booting can you navigate around the BIOS settings? if you can would indicate it’s a windows not a hardware problem.

leave it runnign on bios for a bit and see if it stops responding after a bit?

Might be overheating of hard drive, but I seem to recall that they tend to power themselves down if overheating to protect the CPU.

If there are no error messages then it could be rather difficult to diagnose what is going wrong.

Some suggestions:

1. open the case and check for crap/dust/anything that shouldn’t be there ( I’ve had to deal with a fatal case of strawberry yoghurt poisoning with a PC before ).

2. Give all the connectors internal and external a good checking – a lose cable could cause random problems

3. Check the Windows error log ( right click on My Computer -> Manage -> Event Viewer -> System ) post up anything that looks wrong-ish on here.

4. If there is nothing really important on the PC consider just re-imaging it ( this is a nice way of divining whether the problem is hardware or software related and has the benefit of cleaning up x number of years of remnants of programs/junk ).

it’s not a battery keyboard and mouse is it? if it is, change the batteries 😉

Guys I have had an overheating issue with a laptop before and this isnt the issue, it is literally only on for a minute before it does not respond to the keyboard/ mouse which is frustrating because I cannot do anything with it.

Also whilst booting up the screen briefly goes blank and comes back on again which is unusual, its like its got some sort of bug or virus in it??

Press F8 before it boots so you can go into safe mode. Then remove the porndialler/spyware ;-), then run the “check disk for errors” thing.

Guys I have had an overheating issue with a laptop before and this isnt the issue, it is literally only on for a minute before it does not respond to the keyboard/ mouse which is frustrating because I cannot do anything with it.

The computer I have at the moment the bearings, paste and mounts for the CPU cooler were knackered. Sometimes it would die after heavy use other times it would crash whilst booting. Sorted now thanks to a CPU cooler so why not have a look and see.

We had one at work start doing this, turned out to be a duff stick of ram, if it’s got more than one try running it with only one stick in at a time to see if that eliminates the problem.

We had one at work start doing this, turned out to be a duff stick of ram, if it’s got more than one try running it with only one stick in at a time to see if that eliminates the problem.

Funnily enough I upgraded the RAM from Crucial about 6 months ago, have not had any issues until recently though.

Checking RAM is certainly worth trying too don’t be fooled in thinking Crucial is great memory, they are good at replacing it though.

What Tom said.

In the absence of other information and assuming that it’s not a wireless keyboard, overheating issues would be fairly high on my list of things to check. Just because you’ve “had it before” doesn’t mean that all heat-related issues are going to have the same symptoms. A CPU without sufficient thermal conduction can fail in seconds (sometimes catastrophically and spectacularly, check out the Tom’s Hardware videos).

Temporarily removing the new RAM, or the old RAM, can’t hurt either.

But, as above, a chkdsk and “does it do it in safe mode” are your first steps.

Hi guys

It would not recognise the F8 button whilst booting up.

But it did boot up ok this time for some reason.

So I did a chkdsk from the run menu (was that an ok thing to do??).

It did warn me that no F paramater was specified whilst I was doing this os it was in read only mode whatever that means.

Verifying files was ok

Verifying indexes led to an orphaned file being recovered (TMFF64..)

Verifying security descriptors was ok

Sorry if I sound like I dont know what Im doing, because I dont really… 😕

oh – and now its frozen again – harumph!

ps everything seems to running cool enough, fan running, air coming out the back etc.

Not being able to boot in safe mode is a slight set back.

You could boot up a Linux live CD (for example Ubuntu) or a system recovery distro. This will allow you to do loads of things such as

run checks on the disk
look at the temperatures (might also be worth checking these in BIOS)
back up the important files
run a virus scan on it
run your hard disk manufacturers diagnostic tool

UBCD can be helpful in getting out of messy situations:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

As above also run only 1 stick of RAM if possible

check voltages being supplied to RAM in BIOS are ok

can also rub memtest86 to see if any of the RAM sticks are monged

Sounds just like a pc of mine from a while ago.

I think it was overheating. The actual cpu itself. Fan was clogged with crap, and repeated overheating killed the chip in the end.

Hmmm I just pulled out all three RAM cards, it seemed to me that the third one (the crucial one) was a bit loose, perhaps it had not been pushed in hard enough?? I was surprised at how firm I had to push them to get them back in.

Also checked the fan and chip fins and they are ok.

So decided to put all three back in and fire it back up.

5 minutes in and its still running

Have tried that “memtest86” command but it does not recognise it.

Ye you need a live CD (or some bootable media) containing it (memtest)

If its overheating like a ___ (the CPU) then you need to think why that is.. are all the fans working.. what RPM they running at.. what temps are showing in the BIOS.. do any sound like a plane taking off – are the bearing going?

Do you need to repaste and reseat the heat-sink-fan on the CPU?

Is this thing caked in dust?

Id leave as much RAM out as you can until you find the problem

It could be all sorts of things but on the off chance that it is a software issue it must be worth trying a system restore (assuming it’s XP or later) back to a time when it was working. If it still freezing then I would have thought it was likely to be a hardware issue.

Some BIOSes have temperature/voltage monitors built in which might be worth a look (it might be temperature or PSU related).

Well its still running, so it could have been a loose RAM card????

Fingers crossed.

Thank a million guys, really helpful.

🙂 🙂