This is really pi55ing me off now...

Every now and again my computer just hangs for about a minute. With the HDD light flashing once per second. After that it recovers and continues what it was doing.

Its most commonly does this if you are installing software, or doing something which is causing a lot of activity on the system.

As far as I can determine its a hardware problem as its done it with with both XP and Vista since I built the machine, but its now begining to drive me nuts.

I have recently installed another HDD which is being used for the operating system, the PC hang whether its installed on either HDD.

I have taken out my 2 original sticks of ram, leaving just a brand new pair in, still the same problem.

I have also increased the size of the windows paging file to monstrous proportions. (10Gb)

While it is hanging the system monitor shows zero activity on HDD, memory, CPU and Network.

It does the same thing regardless of a fresh OS install or a 6 month old one.

Spec:
Gigabyte GA-M52-S3P motherboard
AMD X2 6000 processor
6GB DDR2 800Mhz RAM
512Mb Nvidia 8800GT Graphics Card
550wW Hiper power supply
1TB and 500Gb Barracuda HDDs Sata300
Linksys Wireless card
Soudblaster X-fi sound card

Suggestions please before the pc gets tipped out of the window...

Cheers,
David

David, I personally would change the page file back to the recommended setting but move it onto another disk if there is another one in there. Are you getting a lot of page faults, is this the reason behind increasing the page file?

The ram thats left in, is it the same as whats been in or a differnet brand. Is it/they in the correct slots? Were they a matched pair? Most high performance mainboards will specify the slots to use for certain high performance types of ram.

I had a similar problem with a usb lynksys wifi dongle so could be driver related, can you take out the wifi card for a while?

Can you run the machine in safe mode for a while?

Make sure you are using the latest cpu drivers from amd available HERE and do the main board bios if possible too.

Hope you get it sorted m8 and sorry for asking loads of questions!

Regards

Rich

[Edited on 25/10/08 by RichardK]

that is a mad comp spec! bet it cost you a pretty penny

Is the HD you're using for the OS a solid state drive? or is it one of the barracudas?

I increased the pagefile on some advice from somewhere else. The recommended setting was 4GB. I can move it to another drive, as there is another 80Gb IDE drive in there which is currently not plugged in.

The RAM thats left in is a different brand, but the same spec as the 2 sticks I toook out. They are in the recommended matched slots.

I will try taking out the wi-fi card. Its using windows drivers which were relaeased as linksys werent offering Vista 64 drivers for it. But it is being detected as the correct card.

Not tried safe mode yet. The problem is it mainly seems to do it during software installs or high activity times.

The bios has been updated as it needed to be to recognise my 1TB drive.

The OS drive is the 1TB Barracuda. Its on a 50GB partition at the start of the drive. I had exactly the same thing happening when XP was installed on the 500GB drive too so its not the HDD causing the problem...

Cheers,
David