Fun news and a question

[theacefes]

Fun news: For my birthday I got a new Casio keyboard to complement my current one (I know...Yamaha and Casio..blasphemy!) but my current instrument library is expanded greatly through this so I expect I will be putting out some new music as I mess around and try to combine the best of both. I feel all pro now.

 

Now for the question: Gf's computer is acting funny. It's a custom build and about 6 months old running Windows 7 Professional, and a fairly good gaming computer. Here are a series of weird behaviors it keeps displaying.

 

This started a month ago.

 

1st and 2nd time: Full on freeze. She restarted her computer and it went through the motherboard splash screen, and then went to a black screen with a blinking underscore in the top left. The underscore blinked for about 9 minutes before it went to an all black screen. Next, it went to the startup repair screen. The repair was done but no indication of what was wrong with it.

 

3rd time: Full on freeze. Restarted, went through motherboard screen, then went to a black screen, however, this time it went through the process quicker and went to startup repair. This time though, it said it could not fix the problem. It indicated to remove any peripherals so she did (a wireless USB adaptor) and restarted and it started up normally.

 

On a side note, sometime between the 1st and 2nd time, she received a blue screen that made a reference to a bad driver. I don't have the error code on me but I thought I would mention it.

 

Any ideas?

[Wisp]

The freezes and boot problems sound a lot like hardware problems, I think.

Most hard drive manufacturers offer some diagnostics utility. E.g. Seagate have SeaTools for Seagate and Maxtor drives. You might want to give that a whirl and see if it turns up anything.

Backing up anything worth keeping might also be a good idea, regardless of whether or not it's the hard drive that's the problem.

[theacefes]

The freezes and boot problems sound a lot like hardware problems, I think.

Most hard drive manufacturers offer some diagnostics utility. E.g. Seagate have SeaTools for Seagate and Maxtor drives. You might want to give that a whirl and see if it turns up anything.

Backing up anything worth keeping might also be a good idea, regardless of whether or not it's the hard drive that's the problem.

 

I have a job as a tech on the side....unfortunately I would not have asked if I didn't try those already. The hard drives turn up no errors or indication that they are failing.

 

And yes, everything is backed up. I haven't done a full diagnostic on it yet because I haven't had the time to go through every hardware component. I was thinking the RAM or the board, but something is telling me it could be USB port related.

 

However, I welcome any other suggestions. Maybe this is a common occurence with Windows 7? Or perhaps it really is a hardware thing.

[Wisp]

unfortunately I would not have asked if I didn't try those already.

*pout* Those are the sorts of things you mention at the start.

 

Anyway, is the problem reproducible at all or is it totally random?

 

Seeing as how you're equipped to make your own guesses, I'll spare you mine (and guesses is all I got at this point).

[theacefes]

I can't reproduce it...for now. I'll have to keep messing with it. Thanks anyway.

[Arashi Kai]

Curse the unreliability of Windows !

 

Try the wireless adapter on another computer with reliable USB (assuming it is compatible with the proper OS ) and see if it causes the same problems. If it does, it might be the adapter, and you'll need a new one.

 

 

 

This is why I been toying with going over to Linux: I can avoid these problems

[Steve]

It sounds like a heat problem, and the hottest component in a computer is the video card.