hawkjm73

I am running a Dell Inspiron 9100 which is prone to seemingly random hard freezes. By hard freeze, I mean a total stop, no mouse movement, no hard drive noise, no ctrl-alt-del, no BSOD, no log entries. The only recovery is the long power button press followed by a restart. System will always restart immediately. I don't believe it is heat related, as most of the freezes happen at low stress times (a little web browsing, playing Windows card games...) and the system can remain stable under high stress at much higher temps. I do monitor the temps with I8FanGui.

I have found two situations that can force a freeze to occur. The first is to run any bittorrent client. (No, I don't want help with bittorrent, but I think something in its network protocall may be somehow stressing the system. For any worried, I've been using Linux distro downloads to test this part of the issue.) This will cause a freeze to occur much faster then the system otherwise would, in hours or minutes vrs. days. I'm wondering if there is a way to stress test with various types of network packets. If a specific type can reproducibly cause a freeze, that could strongly narrow things down to the NIC.

Otherwise, if I run ATI tray tools, a program for monitoring and controlling an ATI graphics card, at the same time the ATI External Event Monitor service is running, I get an immediate freeze. These two programs are known to conflict, so I have no idea if this freeze is in any way related to the random system freezes.

My two main suspects are the network card and the video card. The NIC is cheap, so I'll be replacing it soon. The video card my not be replaceable, as I have been unable to find one, from Dell, Ebay or elsewhere. The system can run graphics intensive games with no increase in the frequency of freezes. This issue has occurred across two different hard drives, in Windows XP Pro and in Vista and has been pretty much consistent for the 3.5 years I've had this computer. I am confident that it is free of virii, spyware, adware and other nastys. All drivers are up to date.

So, in conclusion, I am looking for any testing software that might be able to assist me in hunting down this problem. Any other pointers will be gratefully accepted.


System Specs:
Dell Inspiron 9100
Windows Vista Ultimate
ATI Mobility Radeon 9800
Intel Pro/Wireless 2200 B/G
2Gig Dell Ram (thoroughly tested with memcheck86)
Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz Prescott core
Dell TrueMobile 350 Bluetooth
Hitachi 100Gig 7200 RPM
Removable CD/DVD Burner

TriggerFinger

hi,

test your RAM with Memtest96+ and run CHKDSK /R on your hard drive using Recovery Console of XP install CD.