computer freezes

[Marilyn de Queiroz]

Lately it seems that my one year old computer will chug along just fine for several hours, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. Suddenly everything will just freeze -- the mouse, the keyboard, even the reset button doesn't work.

Someone suggested that this is probably a hardware problem. I run virus scans regularly, so I think that it probably isn't that.

Any ideas?

[Michael Ernest]

I always look at the modem first when I get that.

[Frank Carver]

I got that on one of mine. Turned out to be a video card which was locking up the machine (at least, the problem seemed to go away when I swapped it out). Never got to the bottom of why, though

[Marilyn de Queiroz]

I unhooked my cable modem. Same problem. Someone suggested that it might be bad memory. Maybe I have to replace hardware piece by piece and when the problem stops, it's fixed?

[Nathan Pruett]

What are you doing when the computer freezes? I had that problem with one of my boxes and it turned out to be a video card that was overheating... Everything would run fine until I started up a game or something, and then it would run for about 5 minutes and lock up. When I rebooted I got all kinds of freaky windows errors unless I waited 5 minutes for the card to cool down. Finally it started freezing about 5 minutes after any graphics were on the screen... even the windows desktop! So right now I am running Linux in text mode on it until I decide what new video card I want to buy...

In the past I have also had intermittent lockups due to bad memory... that's a little harder to troubleshoot without extra memory lying around...

-Nate