Dear Ask-a-nerd: Computer "check up" programs?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

If I had to hazard a guess I'd utterly contradict Kevin and say you have a faulty capacitor either on your mobo or graphics card which is fucking up your buffering. Mobo seems most likely.

Don't make me google, please.
Oh, Mother Board.

[pErvinalia]

Have you tried starting your machine in "safe mode"? Try that and see if it is still freezing. HOnestly, it still sounds like a ram or perhaps a hard drive issue. I'll get back to you soon with a good free HD diagnostic tool.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Have you tried starting your machine in "safe mode"? Try that and see if it is still freezing. HOnestly, it still sounds like a ram or perhaps a hard drive issue. I'll get back to you soon with a good free HD diagnostic tool.

Thanks. It doesn't always freeze up, so I'd be running in safe mode waiting for an event that might not happen.

[pErvinalia]

I used to get the same thing with Firefox (and sometimes other apps). It was a memory problem in my case.

For checking your hard drive, try CristalDiskInfo. I think this is the one I've used before to find problems on my hard drive. http://download.cnet.com/CrystalDiskInf ... 32082.html

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Oh, and FireFox loads with a semi-transparent window. Only the three icons in the upper right are solid. Weird.

I'll try that out, rEv.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

No errors.

[pErvinalia]

Are you comfortable or familiar with opening up your computer and prodding around in it's insides? If so, it would be worth checking that all connections in there are seated properly. If it's not your ram, you could check that your hard drive connections (on both the drive and the mother board) and video card connections are right.

A question - Do you have a stand-alone video card, or is it an inbuilt card on your mother board?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I need to vac it out anyway. I have no problem "getting under the hood."

My graphics adapter is "ATI Radeon HD 5700 series"

[Gawdzilla Sama]

[pErvinalia]

Do you have an onboard graphics card as well? If you did, you would have an extra unused socket for your monitor cord on the back of your computer. One thing to try to fault check the card would be to unplug your ATI card and use your onboard card and see if the problem still happens.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Do you have an onboard graphics card as well? If you did, you would have an extra unused socket for your monitor cord on the back of your computer. One thing to try to fault check the card would be to unplug your ATI card and use your onboard card and see if the problem still happens.

I only show one graphics adapter.

[Jason]

If you haven't stress tested your memory and you have a linux live cd there is a memory test option from the boot menu on most distros or you can live boot and run memtester from the console. It will stress test your memory address by address. It's very thorough.

You can also use fsck to check and repair your NTFS hard drive if necessary.

[pErvinalia]

he's run memtest with I'm pretty sure is the same one found on linux distros.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

he's run memtest with I'm pretty sure is the same one found on linux distros.

Yep.

[pErvinalia]

I'm still convinced it's a memory problem. There's a number of memory monitoring tools you can get that can tell you how much of your memory is being used, and allow you to clear out unused bits of the memory. It could be worth running one of them and watching what levels the memory are being used at when your computer freezes. Anything over about 50% is getting into stressful territory. I don't know what the choking point would be, but if it's up above 70% then you'll almost certainly have problems. I use a thing called CleanMem Mini Monitor. It runs in the background and displays the percentage of memory usage down in your windows status bar. I'd give that a go as well, Zilla.