Windows Freezing Up Randomly

[MrControversial]

For a couple of weeks now, my computer has been freezing up either immediately after logging into Windows, minutes thereafter or even hours afterward. I checked the event logs and nothing. I ran Adaware, and Spybot and nothing. I ran chkdsk /r nothing. I even ran memtest for a couple of hours and nothing. I checked the Vrails in the BIOS and nothing. The CPU isn't under much load when it happens either. It could be idle and boom, it locks up. I have to press the reset button to get it back up.

The problem can be anything. The only related problem is that the CMOS settings randomly reset when I rebooted or powered off and on. Sometimes it would be fine and sometimes settings would be reset.

Maybe I need to just reformat? I was planning on blowing the partition to hell once I purchased another hard drive. Right now I'm booting off of Nvidia RAID and it hasn't been the most reliable thing ever and having to jimmy-rig a floppy drive every time I want to reformat has been a pain in the ass.

So I'm going to buy a 80 gig HDD, boot from that and then use the RAID 1 for secondary storage (after converting it to RAID 1). I'm also going to buy 2 GB of memory.

I wasn't able to test the memory sticks because I run a dual channel set up and my mobo doesn't like single sticks of RAM.

 

[mc866]

Set your OC's back to stock timings/levels and see if your issues continue. I had what I thought we stable oc's for a few months and out of nowhere it just became completely unstable.

 

[MrControversial]

Oh, sorry about that. I'm no longer oc'ed. All the OC information in my sig is obsolete.

One more thing. My memory is rated to run at 400 MHz. Since the day I first booted it up, it had problems with dropping the memory to 333 MHz. When I went to the BIOS to reset the memory back to 400 MHz and saved the BIOS, the computer won't post at all.

 

[vanvock]

Time for a new CMOS battery?

 

[krnmastersgt]

Originally posted by: vanvock
Time for a new CMOS battery?

To address the CMOS randomly resetting, yes it would be that the battery is completely dead therefore when you power down the system (via the psu) the charge in the system drains out and there's no way to electronically keep the CMOS settings. Consequently your clock should also reset every time this happens if I'm not mistaken.

 

[MrControversial]

Update:

--I replaced the memory (now reads 400 MHz in the BIOS instead of 333 MHz) to 2 GB of memory instead of 1.
--I added a new hard drive. I'm now booting on a single 80 GB drive instead of a RAID partition. I converted the RAID 1 to RAID 0 and am using it for storage.
--Clean install of Windows XP

Everything worked fine last night. Computer was zippy as hell and it felt like I went back in time. I installed all my apps. Not one freeze. Then I go to bed and when I got up the next morning, the screen was frozen on the wallpaper. I had mouse movements and my keyboard still worked but windows wouldn't respond. Again this is a fresh install with all patches installed.

I checked the Event Viewer and everything was fine up until exactly midnight. The only message was something about .net 3.0 or something, no errors or anything. Just for the hell of it I ran Prime95 and the computer ran like a champ.

All of this started to happen when I installed Mozy on my computer. However I've been running Mozy non-stop for like 3 days (by itself and nothing else running) with no problems. It's only when I have Outlook, Mozy, Symantec Endpoint Protection and FireFox open that it locks up.

There's no way this can be a hardware issue.

 

[MrControversial]

Okay, I did a selective startup in Windows XP and it lasted through the night. I'm thinking that there's something about the Mozy service that is locking up my computer.

 

[amdskip]

--2 x 160GB Seagate Barracuda NCQ in RAID 0 (Files)

Not sure what the problem is but you do understand what raid 0 is right? One drive fails and everything is gone. Not exactly how I would go about setting up storage.