Medion
06-02-07, 11:30 AM
Was a bit tough to figure which forum to put this in, but since I've ruled out hardware at this time (could be wrong), I decided to post it here.
My wife's PC freezes within 1-3 minutes after bootup, without fail, every time. The mouse pointer can still be moved. I can "open" the Windows start menu (this is WinXP SP2, btw), and then it freezes in places. any active window freezes. They cannot be moved, resized, or closed. Any application open freezes.
My first guess was overheating. I looked inside the case, and sure enough, the mobo chipset fan was disconnected. I reconnected it, and waited a few hours before trying again. Still freezing, so my next thought was "crap, we burnt out the mobo".
So, I loaded in safemode (without networking). No problems. I did a full scan with AVG, Spybot, and Adaware. No viruses, nothing from Spybot, and Adaware picked up 20 tracking cookies. Rebooted into normal mode, same thing still hapening.
Here's what I was doing at the time of the first freeze. I ran "Windows Update" on both PCs. I tend to do these at the same time on both. On my PC, it loaded fine, showing the usual "Custom/Express" buttons. On hers, it said there was a new windows update version. I clicked install, wondering why heres would prompt and mine wouldn't. After install, it froze, and hasn't worked properly since.
So naturally, I'm wondering how I could have gotten a virus from MS's website, or why AVG won't detect it. Next, I'm going to use Safe mode with netoworking, to ensure that I have the latest AVG update, as well a suse housecall.
But I'm at my wit's end, and any help would be appreciated. I'll probably put a link to this thread in my sig, so the members who only browse the higher traffic forums might look at this.
My wife's PC freezes within 1-3 minutes after bootup, without fail, every time. The mouse pointer can still be moved. I can "open" the Windows start menu (this is WinXP SP2, btw), and then it freezes in places. any active window freezes. They cannot be moved, resized, or closed. Any application open freezes.
My first guess was overheating. I looked inside the case, and sure enough, the mobo chipset fan was disconnected. I reconnected it, and waited a few hours before trying again. Still freezing, so my next thought was "crap, we burnt out the mobo".
So, I loaded in safemode (without networking). No problems. I did a full scan with AVG, Spybot, and Adaware. No viruses, nothing from Spybot, and Adaware picked up 20 tracking cookies. Rebooted into normal mode, same thing still hapening.
Here's what I was doing at the time of the first freeze. I ran "Windows Update" on both PCs. I tend to do these at the same time on both. On my PC, it loaded fine, showing the usual "Custom/Express" buttons. On hers, it said there was a new windows update version. I clicked install, wondering why heres would prompt and mine wouldn't. After install, it froze, and hasn't worked properly since.
So naturally, I'm wondering how I could have gotten a virus from MS's website, or why AVG won't detect it. Next, I'm going to use Safe mode with netoworking, to ensure that I have the latest AVG update, as well a suse housecall.
But I'm at my wit's end, and any help would be appreciated. I'll probably put a link to this thread in my sig, so the members who only browse the higher traffic forums might look at this.