having a weird pc problem

[Yves Larose]

hey guy's i'm having a very weird pc problem, i'm running Win XP home edition (freshly installed) and i have all the updates, the pc frooze only when i do certain things. it frooze when i surf the net, when i try to view a YouTube video, when i try to view a movie with VLC player, when i listen to music with Windows media player but i can play Race 07 for 3 hours and the pc doesn't frooze everything run just fine.

any ideas what could be the problem ?

 

[Jim Cole]

Off the top of my head I would say it has something to do with an installed audio/video player plugin. The reason I think that is the case is because you only get this when trying to do something with audio/video and not regular audio or graphics required to run in the game. The system running fine while racing suggests that your normal sound drivers and graphics drivers are doing their job. Try uninstalling and reinstalling anything else related to audio/video such as flash player, iTunes etc and see what happens.

For a thorough uninstall I suggest using a program like ccleaner after you uninstall to make sure there are no issues in the registry and then install the programs again. Make sure you reboot between uninstall and install.

 

[Rupe Wilson]

The last time i was having problems i ended up with a complete reinstall, thinking it was my noobish attempt to install my system I followed all instruction to the letter, and still after 3 weeks the dreaded blue screen returned ... also pc freezes when going from game to desktop etc... i finally got my Ssd drive installed and was told by the pc shop that 1 of my memory sticks was faulty... 16 gig is now 12 ... all my problems have gone away..that's about 6 months of stress on maybe a 30 euro part.....( could probably go down to 8 with my i5 processor .. more balanced)

 

[Ho3n3r]

RAM. Take out one stick at a time, alternating them, for however many you have, and test again.

That should tell you whether or not it is RAM.

 

[Senad Subasic]

I've been having disk issues for a long time now, check if your HDD LED is constantly on during the freezes.

 

[Tiens Van Zyl]

I agree with Jim on this.

Seems to be audio/video codec or driver related.
Update all drivers for all your hardware is what I would do first. If it was hardware related (faulty) then your PC would freeze randomly with random intensive tasks.

Also check your event viewer for problems there. It might point you to the right direction

 

[Henry Muller]

on flash video playback (like youtube) something that might help is disabling hardware acceleration (right click on the video, go to settings)

have you tried checking stability with a software like OCCT?
but as said above, try unistalling/reinstalling audio/video drivers, and codecs

 

[Yves Larose]

i formatted my hard drive and reinstalled windows many times and the only effect it had is that the problem got worse. i fanally got a bootable cd with utilities to check the hardware and the cpu, ram, HDD and video card work just fine according to the test but the moment i,m trying to test the motherboard the utility apps close so i'm guessing the problem is the motherboard which is over 4 years old meaning that i need to do a full upgrade

thanks for your help guy's.

p.s. writing this message from a friend pc.

 

[Adrian Britton]

You know when you say you are doing a "format" are you using the windows XP format or are you using the hard drive software that runs in dos ?
As the windows XP format software only does a surface format, which means your not really wiping the drive clean.

 

[Lee Knight]

Sounds like a very similar problem which Im currently suffering....
Always freezes when trying to view an embedded You Tube clip....
I have both Windows XPHome & service pack3 as well as Ubuntu 11.04 on the one system & I suffer no problems of this kind on the Ubuntu partition.
When it freezes I do the Ctrl+Alt+Del thing & shut Mozilla down.
Mozilla then refuses to start again until I've shut off the PC.
When I shut PC down I get a message saying Msg program is still running do you want to wait or force it to shut...blah-blah-blah...
Whether I let it run or I force it to shut down it Blue Screens for a moment before going into the restart process.
When I restart & it finally sorts itself out Mozilla then opens onto a web page automatically telling me about Blue Screen shut downs...

Im currently living on a bit of a tight budget & after several visits to the PC shop costing a bundle about the only advice is that the latest Mozilla has 'bugs' relating to Microsoft Messenger Service which is crazy as Ive deleted that from my PC....
Ive got a long term warranty on my PC's components & if they're found to be faulty will be replaced for free but it's a matter of proving that while it's in the shop & THEN, if it they DO replace them Im stuck without BTB until the license renews (NOOOooo!-lol)

I'll keep checking on this thread to see if anyone finds a fix & I'll report back in if I find one.
Best of luck!

 

[Adrian Britton]

Yeah Windows xp is bad nowa days on online streaming as the memory management only supports so much and allocates it in different ways compared to vista or windows 7.

So the more programs or background services you run, the less you have for onlne activities such as media streaming, this results in memory dumps when the streaming runs out of space or virtual memory.

XP deals with this by trying to move various services to different memory maps, which means various services have to shutdown then start back up again in different mappings.
This inturn causes speed problems and dropped services and if xp drops a service it is currently using as a priority then it crashes.

 

[Lee Knight]

.....the more programs or background services you run, the less you have for onlne activities such as media streaming, this results in memory dumps when the streaming runs out of space or virtual memory.

But Ive had it happen when there's no other programs running &, most times, the exact same place ion the exact same video clip....
Which REALLY has me puzzled....

 

[Adrian Britton]

If you press Ctrl+Alt and Delete and view processes, XP runs as standard with around 55 processes anything more then around 70 and the memory management will be over worked or have problems managing and mapping services.

Try watching the performance monitoring and see how much memory it uses whilst your doing what it is you doing when it crashes.

Make a note of the blue screen error message and do a search on it in windows support pages, in there it will tell you what the problem is.

When I used XP I kept my services below 60-65 max, this means XP's priotiry services run smoothly.

 

[Jim Cole]

@Lee Knight My suggestion would be to first run malwarebytes anti malware program and see if it comes up with anything. If it doesn't, then I would uninstall and then reinstall your flash player as a lot of videos require that now a days. If this still doesn't take care of it, try and remove firefox and reinstall. The symptom with blue screen when watching a video in a browser is an indication that it is not hardware, especially with it happening at a specific point in the video.

Another option would be to install a different browser to see if the same thing happens.

@Adrian Britton When I was running XP, I never had more than 35 services running at any given time. If you have that many running, I would suggest you do a little tweaking in order to get rid of unneeded processes. A good guide for tweaking can be found here: http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_1.html
This is a basic guide, but if you donate to the author you can get a more involved guide. The guide title is for TES Oblivion, but it is good for anyone that games.

 

[Adrian Britton]

@ Jim Cole
I have not run XP for years now, I run windows 7 only (with the exemption SuSE Linux)
XP is old hat now and not worth touching anymore because of its unstability.

So your best directing your advice to Yves and Lee

 

[Jim Cole]

Only directed it at you because you mentioned it, but it is good for anyone, even when you are running Windows 7

 

[Adrian Britton]

Fair enough dude, but I only have things running that I want to have running.

I would go into detail on how to open regedit and manually do tweaking, but like you will probably know, it will confuse others and can cause more damage then good if you dont know what your doing.

 

[Henry Muller]

as I said, for youtube and flash video, try disabling hardware acceleration, it can cause a few issues with some hardware/software...

XP still pretty usable, there nothing to wrong for most uses;
a very clean install can be running with around 20 processes

the easiest way to disable unnecessary process is to use win+r (run) msconfig, or services.msc and disable things on startup and services

I like a software called ccleaner, to delete old files and registry
as for virus protection, MSE is free and works OK (is not the best, but is decent enough in my opinion) and it doesn't slowdown the PC as some other solutions...

and as suggested above, try always to read what is the error on the blue screen,
disabling auto restart will help with that
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/tipstricks/ht/disautorestart.htm

you can also take a look on the "even viewer" on control panel

 

[Yves Larose]

i finally change my motherboard (used one) and everything work fine