Computer Issues... (Solved)

[Retribution]

Hey All,

Having a bit of trouble with one of our PCs and I was hoping some of you techies might be able to share a bit of wisdom...

It has been working fine for about a year but recently started having a few issues, in particular hanging if it has to do anything slightly intensive. As the computer hasn't been modified recently I doubted it was a hardware issue and just put it down to the fact my parents use this computer (who knows what they might have done) and after backing up the data I attempted a reformat. I managed to install windows (still using xp on that machine) no problem and continued to update to SP3. However I cannot get the machine to get through the update without hanging.

I checked cpu (e6600) temps in the bios and they are very high (60 degrees celsius at idle) which I found strange as it had a good aftermarket heatsink on. I decided to try a reseat anyway but that appeared to have no effect, and I even found tried the stock cooler again just to make sure... still 60 degrees in bios at idle. I have tried manually exerting extra pressure onto the heatsink in case it was a little loose (but after 4 goes at reseating the 2 heatsinks I don't think this is the case) and temps stayed high. Note that I am not using high quality thermal paste (just my luck that the comp dies 2 weeks after I took all my pc repair/maintenance stuff to uni with me ) but that shouldn't give me idle temps 25 degrees higher than I'd expect.

The bios temps make me suspicious that the cpu is overheating, but the thing is that even when the cpu starts to load a bit higher the heatsink never gets past feeling only mildly warm, the northbridge chipset however is much much hotter, even when the computer is just sitting at idle, but the bios reports this temperature at only 35 degrees. Also, any overheating issues I have heard of caused the system to shut down, rather than hang until reset, but I might be completely mistaken on that. Additionally, I never have any issue actually installing windows, and it seems odd that this wouldn't be an issue yet installing a new service pack would.

I am a bit confused as to what to try, so I just wondered if you guys would let me know what you would try if you had problems like this... want to be sure before I go about ordering new parts.

Cheers,
Travis

[gandoron]

heat can absolutely cause the computer to hang instead of shutting down, depends on what it effects. Get some thermal paste, it makes a MASSIVE difference. if the heat sink isn't getting warm, then it's def the cpu to heatsink interface...which all depends on the paste. if the heatsink and north bridge are hot, then look at case cooling.

-G

[Retribution]

I found some thermal paste and transferred one of the heatsinks with a better backplate from our other computers, and retried installing the service pack. Temps measured on core temp never went above 50 degrees but the computer still hung, any ideas as to what else might be causing these issues?

Cheers

[TJ]

How is your motherboard? Does it have any drivers you can install or anything like that? Also, try reseating your RAM. That may help...

[Retribution]

Hey guys... sorted out the problem. Turns out the hard drive was throwing up bad sectors, and I had assumed it was the cpu as when the HDD activity increases so does the CPU activity. Anyway I removed the offending drive and all seems to be going smoothly, until the next issue haha.

Thanks for your help,
Ret