Hi,
Catbyte has done a lot of work trying to solve this issue and he doesn't think it's malware related. I keep having random Explorer.exe crashes, some of the apps we ran like OTL had to be run in Safe Mode because it would crash with the "(program) has encountered a problem" and on several occasions, like trying to run Windows Updates rebooted the PC and once while watching a video it froze and rebooted itself. The computer is about 7 years old I think but recently I have replaced the power supply, RAM and all HDs. Only thing not changed it the Mobo, CPU and video card. Event Viewer is not much help determining what the heck is going on. I'm sure if I could just figure out what the problem is, I could solve it but how to find out? Any WTT techs have some utilities that can help me find out? Thanks.
Eric
Lastly, you should perform a full hard drive surface scan to ensure the hard drive's physical integrity: http://hddscan.com/ - Perform a READ surfact test on your hard drive. DO NOT mess up and perform an erase surface test or say bye bye data. Results are provided in the status window. We are interested in bad sectors.
While performing memory and hard drive tests you should wiggle connections and make sure everything is solid and that it does not cause your computer to power off, reboot, freeze up, hang up temporarily, etc.
If your system passes all of this without trouble then its probably not a hardware problem.
Ran memory test for 10 passes w/o errors, even with tapping on RAM. Rebooted and it locked up. Booted in Safe mode to remove a few programs from Startup, then got Explorer.exe error. Initiated CHKDSK on C: drive, had no errors. Rebooted, now can't start Windows in Normal or Safe mode. Some capacitors on Mobo look suspicious so ordered a replacement (lucky to find one) which should arrive by Wed. Hope that is the issue. Would really like to get my SSD drive back in there, but not till this is fixed. Hope I don't have to buy a new PC, oh, wait, I just did, one piece at a time! So far all the new PCs I've looked at won't support 3 monitors; either onboard video or PCI 16x but not both! That's annoying.
ok, that's frustrating. It booted into BIOS and then when I rebooted it started a chkdsk which completed without errors. It froze in exactly the same place as before I replaced the Mobo. Now I've replaced everything except the addon video card. I guess I'll pull that to see what happens.
no change it still locked up at the same place, before anything loads in the systray. Dang, can't even boot into Safe mode. guess I'll be trying a Repair next.
pulled the video card, got onboard video, system still hung after seeing Start bar but before systray loaded. tried Safe mode and it loaded all the files but then stopped before Windows launched. tried Repair but when it rebooted, got disk read error. going to dump a previous image on it to see if that will boot. Unfortunately, I don't have a WinXP boot disk with SP3, trying to find one.
