Random hard locks

[Skrot]

Hey,

My girlfriend's computer has been experiencing frequent hard locks at seemingly completely random times. Specs are: Athlon XP 2000+, Epox EP-8K3A+ motherboard, 512mb corsair ram, ATI 9600pro 256mb video card, 2* 80gig seagate hard drives, 350 watt power supply that came with the case (cheap case.. 100$ or so).

The hard locks really dont seem to happen at any consistent time, but there appears to be a higher chance for it to happen while playing World of Warcraft. The higher load probably has something to do with it, but we frequently wake up with the computer locked and need to reboot it. I suspect a dodgy power supply, due to its cheapness. The computer has been upgraded a couple times recently. The video card used to be a Geforce 3 Ti500, the hard drive used to be an old 30gig thingy. The same thing was happening back then. So I guess the only thing it could be is the CPU/motherboard/ram or the powersupply.

Any ideas for how to further find out what is causing it, or a potential fix?

Cheers

[Riptide]

Diagnostics. Run memtest86 overnight for starters. See if the RAM shows up as having any problems. If it passes that try running Prime95 blend test for at least a few hours and see what happens.

If it passes both of those it might be the video card. In that case run 3dmark looped and see what happens.

[Skrot]

Okay, I will try that. I remember running a memory test a while ago, and all seemed okay. I figured that things would also crash as well with dodgy memory, not just the same old complete hard lock. We have changed the video card and the same thing is happening, though. Cheers.

[Slyder]

I suspect that Epox board.

Here in the UK they are considered a cheap alternative to quality boards like Gigabyte or MSI and are prone to be faulty. I dont think this isnt always the case in other countrys thou. I have had 3 that were just plain awful.

[Skrot]

I haven't heard that about Epox before. The board appears to be made well, and I've had a couple epox boards and they've been good from what I can tell.

I ran memtest86 from the gentoo livecd while we were out at the movies, and there were 3 errors on like runs 1 5 and 7 or something in the same memory location. So I'm probably going to throw one of my memory sticks in there to see if that fixes the problem.