Hi,

Hopefully someone will be able to help me. I have a Dell 630m which started to freeze whilst booting up - the actual point that this would occur would vary but generally it would be whilst XP was booting and the progress bar would just stop. However it would also occasionally freeze whilst performing the bios checks or as soon as a selection was made on the boot menu.

My first thought was the Harddrive was shot but i was able to remove the harddrive and transfer all the data using a harddrive caddy. I changed the small watch battery and that appeared to solve the problem for about 3 weeks however now it refuses to boot again, I changed the watch battery again incase the battery was duff but this time it didnt fix it.

If anybody can suggest anything I'd be greatful.

Thanks

Project7

Sounds like either memory issues, or the cpu overheating.

Remove/reseat the memory and check that the CPU heatsink is properly seated and not fallen off slightly.

Remember to ground yourself if you're working inside the case.

Sounds like a memory issue to me. Try burning memcheck onto a cd-rom and boot from that. Leave it to run for an hour or so and see what is says when you come back. My 50p is on a big fat caputski....

Hi,

Thanks for your replies.

I tried reseating the RAM and CPU, but no luck. When i ran Memtest it stopped responding about 20 minutes in. I tried booting with only one SODIMM installed at a time and in different slots, but it still randomly froze before windows loaded.

Its odd because i had 3 weeks of trouble free use between the problems.

Im all outta ideas hmmm.......