Hey guys,
If I cannot work this out myself , I may aswell drop my machine off somewhere when I get home from Holidays. I'll try here first..

The compyter seems to lockup randomly, and now it is getting more often. The machine is damn near brand new and ran fine for the first 3 months. Now slowly but surely random freezing occcurs. I could be playing WoW , browsing, or simply running a virus scan and it freezes. Used to be once every 4 odd hours , now its much more frquent.

The specs:
Vista Home Premium 64bit
Quadcore Q9400
Asus P5Q3 Deluxe Wifi-AP @n
Gigabyte 280GTX 1GB DDR3
Thermaltake Toughpower 700w PSU
4GB OCZ DDR3


ANy help will be appreciated!

(thinking now, I had the CPU overclocked to 2.99ghz, it crashed once and the mobo said it was taking the cpu speeds to default because O/C failed blahblah, problems MAY have started after this... )

Yeah, I'd O/C that rig too. Not fast enough in it's default state. Anything less than 1 million FPS on WOW is poor.

It does just sound like a general stability prob though. Reset BIOS defaults if you were playing with power settings and reset GFX card O/C software as well and see if that helps.

Does the computer recover from freeze? Or you have to power that baby down via the power cord?

Hard Reset Pinky.. Can't do anything else, which is why i'm thinking hardware..

As yes, Overclocking this machine is probablt pointless. I will Restore bios now and see how we go. I am not using any Software overclocking tools, and have never overclocked the GPU.
Help appreciated Pinky

Revert BIOS settings back to default

Have you got the latest BIOS revision flashed on the mobo?

Most common cause of crashing is faulty RAM or software issues (ie virus/spyware)

Run memtest/goldmem and see if there is any faults.



If still no results we can proceed from there.

Cheers rubba, In the process of flashing bios and running goldmem now.

I had a similar problem with the Asus P5Q3 mobo. It turned out to be some weird automatic underclocking of the cpu fan. Used the auto-update tool that can be found on the cd to update the bios. working fine now.

Also something to do:

Disable auto reboot on BSOD, that way if it is blue screening you will actually know and have some kind of error rather than oh wtf my PC just restarted!

http://vistasupport.mvps.org/disable_automatic_restart_to_read_blue_screen_messages.htm

Flashed bios to the latest version. Took about 20 attempts at a restart to actually get back into windows becuase of some Bluescrren wall of text and a memory dump. Couldnt read it becuase of auto reboot , that setting has been changed now.

This is s***ting me to tears...

Will try running goldmem now and hopefully can get back into windows

4GB OCZ DDR3

wasn't it ocz ram that was really sensitive to heat and easy to blow up?

Bios updated to latest release and all seems well now I'ts actually making it into windows (read above post). Ran goldmem and passed (shareware).

best off using a DOS based memory tester

you can get memtest and goldmem in bootable iso formats

memtest is free so it will be easier to get ;)

Ran goldmem and passed , the bootable iso version. Was shareware , but it passed

fairysmuff

so its not crashing anymore?

Left it on over night on the wow menu screen with the dragon flying around so it was doing something. Not crashed since the initial bios flash where i was getting BSOD.

See hoe we go, might do a format of windows when I get home from holidays just to be sure.

Appreciate your help guys, thanks rubba.

Sounds like it was perhaps RAM incompatibility.

Probably one of the most common changes with new BIOS revisions is additional RAM/CPU support.

If you are capable the first thing you should do for a new system build is flash it up to the latest revision.

In the end it worked out a pretty easy fix :)