Last night I was playing EQ2 and SoE decided they needed to do an emergency 15min patch. OK NP, the game dumps us all out and 40 min later I'm logging back into the game. Everything seems ok and I join a group, about 5 min later my PC locks up. I have to hit reset to get out of it.

When the PC comes back up I get alarm messages about System Zone 2 over heating. Which on my mboard is near the CPU and RAM. I pop the case off and aim a fan at it and it drops the temp about 30 degrees.

I start the game again and everything seems fine at first. Again about 5 min later system locks up again. So, I do reset again. This time however my system hangs just after the Windows XP splash screen goes away. Usually at that point my system boots right away. IT does boot it just takes like 2-3min to do so. I have run all my spyware/anti-virus stuff and I even upgraded video card drivers because I was a few revs behind. So, I'm at a loss as to what this could be.

I'm wondering if it's RAM or my hard drive (both new items less than 3 months old). Has anyone ever seen this and does anyone have a suggestion? I'm going to rum MemTest86 today when I get home. Hopefully if it's bad RAM that will tell me. But would bad RAM heat up? I'm hoping it's not my mboard.

I was playing for about 2 hrs prior to the hot fix last night and everything was fine. This did not happen until after the hot fix. I'm not saying the hot fix did it, it just seems coincidental that it did happen after that. My system so far only locks and hangs in EQ2, all other programs are fine. It was hotting than normal last night so I'm thinking the oheat messages were because of that and hopefully not because of impending hardware failure. It seems more like hard drive to me, but just in case it's something someone has seen I'd appreciate insight as to how to troubleshoot it http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/i/smilies/16x16_smiley-sad.gif

System Specs:

P4 3.2GHZ
2GB or RAM
nVidia 6600 256MB RAM AGP vid card
300GB (IDE) hdd

I like guessing games! =)

I'd start with a HD integrity test. Most manufacturers provide a boot image to burn to cd and run a suite of HD tests. Sounds like your PC overheated and crashed while accessing a system file and corrupted your filesystem in some way. When this has happened to me in the past, I did not attempt a Windows rescue disk or the repair feature of the Windows boot Cd. I installed fresh out of respect for all that is sane.

Can you boot to safemode? If you can, the event viewer in the control panel under admin may have a clue what was going on and help you isolate the boot issue.

Oh, get some airflow in there for the love of triangles!

Thanks for the reply. It's amazing how many different ideas and suggestions people have.


Here is a snippet from a conversation I have been having with techies....

Several people have said power supply and now you along with someone else has said OS corruption. I'm still going to stick with my plan below of trying the restore first.

Thinking back though, I remember a few days or weeks ago I got an alert about my power supply being out of voltage range. It makes me wonder, I will definitely replace it if the restore doesn't do the trick.

I also posted on the tech forums and someone said they saw a similar issue and it was their power supply so it makes me lean more that way but I want to rule everything out before I just jump right to it.

I did test out my hdd last night and was clean, but I will certainly do it again for grins and giggles. Thanks for the suggestions!
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Temp in the office is probably low 70s high 60s.

This is a hard problem obviously b/c I’ve been told many different things as to what is wrong =P



Someone said OS corruption.

Another said mboard.

Someone else said memory.

And now you say PWR supply.



The temp thing I’m not too concerned about as the specs for my mboard according to Intel can run as hot as 165F for SZ2 and SZ1 and CPU zone; the default setting in my monitoring program is 125F but I can change that. I think what I’m going to do is the system restore from Safe Mode first. If that doesn’t work, I will try another hard drive with XP on it. If that doesn’t work, I will run my RAM through a memory tester. If that doesn’t work, I’ll start with a new PWR supply b/c it’s cheaper than my mboard. And if that doesn’t work, then the only thing left will be the mboard. I just REALLY REALLY don’t want a new mboard b/c I will want to change platforms and gawd that’s going to cost allot hahaha. /sigh.




From:
Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2006 11:10 AM
To:
Subject: RE: PC woes



What is the ambient temperature in the room where the computer is at and are the voltage levels on your power supply in spec? I suspect your power supply is failing and the a high ambient temperature will make things worst.



Regards,

Robert

well after all my tests and restore I finally just put my old drive from Feb. back in. I patched EQ2 and was off and running. So my new 300GB drive is bad :( Now the battle to get it replaced begins.

I thought at first it was only EQ2 until I tried to make it lock up in other apps. I started encoding/decoding video and opened up like 30 windows. Finally on the actual copy from disc to DVD phase it locked up. So, that made me think hdd.

thanks all for the suggestions :)

If you have voltage levels that are under spec, that can cause some parts to run hot.

Yes, and actually I think I do. I need a new PWR supply mine is only a 300W, I'm going to bump it up to a higher one. But for now, my funky issues are solved.

Dynamite solves all computer problems.
http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/Geosciences/images/PC_explodes.gif

lol stilll ain't fixed :( grrrrr

I bought a new PWR supply tonight...and new IDE cables. Was still having the same issues on both drives. So, I popped out all my dimms and began testing, I think....think being the key word here that I may have found a bad one...this is odd b/c i've ran multiple memtests and found nothing. there's not much else that could be the issue other than the mboard itself.