Using a HP 9795C this past year and the PC has been freezing up the last two months, and getting worst.
After 10 to 20 minutes this situation occurs. I can not Task Manager it to do a shutdown, I have to hold the power button in for 10 seconds to do a hard shutdown.
I decided to run the Recovery disk and it freezes up too, so I can not get a fresh reinstall done either.
Any solutions out there!
I have not called HP Tech Support just yet, will wait a few days.
Jim
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Make sure airflow to the power supply and the PC is not blocked.
Run a good virus scan. housecall.antivirus.com will do an on line scan for you for free.
Get ad-aware and scan your system for spyware. Some of it is poorly written and can cause major problems.
www.lavasoftusa.com
Run scandisk.
go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and scan for updates. May be a bad driver.
Download and run a memory test program. Should be plenty of them at shareware.com
Find out what harddrive you have and go to the manufacturer's site and download their diagnostic tool. Make sure you don't run the test that erases your harddrive.
Get ZoneAlarm from www.zonelabs.com and install it. (Get the free version.) If you have any funny trojans that the virus scan missed you will see them trying to access the internet.
Open Device Manager - probably via the System Icon in your control Panel. Look for anything with a yellow question mark and delete it then reboot.
If you have a Microsoft Optical mouse try a different mouse. Some of them have been recalled for causing the computer to hang.
Migrated off all my important data today.
Per my tech support calls today,the results after running the Factory Recovery CD install again, produced a hard drive freeze of the PC. System crash.
Time to throw the bomb at this PC. Ran fdisk, and the system freezes / crashed
Call HP back, and they have decided to replace the hard drive. Hope its not the motherboard............
Thanks for the response, I was not running a firewall, just using a dialup or behind a Natted router.......
Seem to be no viruses, and NAV 2002 did crash multiple times trying to finish a full manual file scan..........
The last full clean scan was 06/25/02.
Cleaned up the desktop and system tray, but anyways, these issues really did not affect the outcome of the crashes.
The few times scandisk did finish, no problems.
If not the hard drive, yes RAM memory is certainly a possiblity.
I'll keep you informed next week with the field tech phase......
The problem just seems to be more hardware specific.
Jim did installing the new hard drive work? I am having the same problems as you are. My PC freezes immediately after the initial desktop is loaded. I can boot fine in safe mode. I tried running the recovery CDs provided by HP, I tried REM out the statements in my config.sys and autoexec.bat files, I tried running C:\WINDOWS\OPTIONS\CABS\SETUP.EXE(this runs the ME setup). Nothing has worked. One interesting side note to my problem though is that my monitor is not displaying properly. I get super-imposed windows and whereever there is a line of text, that line is shaded in a light gray. I hooked the monitor to another PC and it was fine. So my suspicions are that the video card is causing the problem.
I sent three replies this weekend, but they seem to have not made it into the forum for some reason. Here's a copy of my second reply.
HP staff : please tell me why they did not make it into the forum.
My final session was on Friday 08/23. Here's a list of the events leading up to the final solution.
Put in the new hard drive, fdisked and formatted into two drives, c = 20GB +
d = 20GB.
Started the HP Recovery, but the computer froze, when putting in the second Recovery CD. This happened a few times, but I was able to finally get the Recovery CDs installed.
After the first reboot, the PC was booting normally into the final setup phase to configure the hardware, but the computer froze up during this phase. It happened many times, with me never able to get to the Win98 ME desktop.
I tried to re-install the Recovery CDs, but it still froze.
I gave up and called tech support and I spend some time troubleshooting with them before we agreed that the motherboard was bad.
Nothing was wrong with the hard drive.......
He a list of troubleshooting highlights we did before we agreed it was the motherboard.
1. At the BOIS Post bootup, I hit the "f1" key to go into the BOIS setup, then I hit the "f5" key to set the BOIS to the default settings.
No change
2. Pulled out the power cable, then held in the power button on the front of the PC case for 30 seconds to purge the capacitors. No change
3. Pulled out the ethernet cable and rebooted. No change
4. Pulled out the keyboard cable and rebooted into Win98, the computer froze, yet again.
So after many hours of troubleshooting, the final is to ship the entire unit back to the factory for the MB repair. 9 Day turnaround.
Thanks all for your help, I tried everything, but I had a hunch it would be the motherboard all this time.
Of course, when starting the computer and it freezes, checking startup in msconfig or in the registry is always an early troubleshooting trick. Bravo on solving the issue, I've been amazed how many viruses work their way into the startup of a PC first.
In my case, the drive was fdisked and formated and it still locked up. I was running NAV 2002 before, so viruses were not a problem.
At one point tech support still believed no hardware was bad and there was a corruption from a virus, even after telling them I had made sure NAV 2002 was running and file scanned with the latest liveupdates.
Status : Day 5 of factory repair - hope to see it back by 09/13
All users and field support people need to remember to get pre-troubleshooting out of the way first before calling tech support.
I am having a similar problem. But it is very intermittent. I am running Windows XP, and it will start freezing randomly. It will freeze, then unfreeze for a little while, then freeze again, and unfreeze for a shorter time. It won't shut down properly - I usually have to just turn it off and back on again. Then it works fine for anywhere between one hour and all day. I thought at first it was the CD player software (I use either Real One or WinAmp) but then once it did it when I didn't have a CD playing.
How do you run msconfig, and what will that tell me?
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