Ideas for nailing a problem

[Parapunter]

I've got a dual boot box, Vista & 7. Lately, the vista side has been freezing randomly. It comes to an immediate halt, no bsod, nothing. I can only reboot it to get going again.

Trouble is there's no crash dump, so I can't run debugger. I've run scannow, cc cleaner, avg, disk cleanup, deleted a bunch of unused software and still it happens. I've even system restored it to before the problem - no joy.

I'm comfy enough tinkering about with the system, but at a bit of a loss as to the next move. Any ideas?

[bnt]

This sounds like hardware to me - whether directly e.g. loose RAM or other components, or indirectly e.g. a dodgy driver for the motherboard or video card sending the hardware in to a stall. After checking the hardware, I'd make sure I had the latest drivers for the core hardware, including the motherboard chipset(s).

PS: any overclocking or other tweaking of hardware settings?

[Parapunter]

no tweaks or o/c, but no crash dump either, which i would normally reckon on for a stuffed driver. I have been through & tried upodating all core drivers too. It is an odd failure, even for Vista.

[Jofm5]

I agree it is a hardware problem.


I have encountered similar before, once it was the hard drive on its way out. This presented itself in the whole machine hanging and only a reset would fix it - it would appear the driver for the SATA disk would hang waiting for a response that would never come. However if your Windows 7 and Vista are on the same disk this may not be the case - Do a scandisk of the vista disk and check that all seems okay.

The other time it happened to me I located it to being the power supply being on its way out. In this instance I was getting the odd freezes and also random reboots. Replacing the power supply resolved this issue and it never happened since.

I would not expect it to be the memory as typically you would get a BSOD when the registers become corrupted.

Cheers

Jof

[Parapunter]

Memtest & scandisk are ok. The installs are on seperate hdd's. The box is an Antec fusion black with 1tb across 2 hdd's. The memory and all other peripherals are well seated & the case is clean and free of dust. I agree that hardware is probably the thing.

I have just updated the sound card and gpu drivers via the mfr's websites rather than via device manager, so we'll see what comes of that. The psu on these is a chunky 430 watt & seems ok, I reckon for now I can discount it.

Thanks for the input chaps, I appreciate it. As I say it's a well built, protected and maintained box, so a puzzle to me.