Bad RAM maybe?

[protegechris]

Well, this is happening more and more lately, and it's driving me mad.

Sometimes, no matter what im doing or how much ram and resources are available, the whole computer just locks up for 10-20 seconds. If a song was playing, the same nanosecond of the song repeats over and over, but my station (which is on another hard drive than everything else) expericances no buimps or anything like that when it happens to my listeners.

Specs:
compaq presario 5000
Pentium 3 700 mhz
256 mb ram
11 MB vid card
2 hard drives, one for radio files, one for o/s and such.

Do yall think it may be a bad stick of RAM?

[Germ]

Maybe

[Bilbo Baggins]

Maybe maybe

[mark]

make backups and format your HDD. if it still occurs, look at hardware.

remember, the glass is either half full or too big.

[protegechris]

I'll do that 2nd, it would take me ages to back up all the stuff on either drive. ill try different sticks of ram, and then a format on hard drive 1, if that fails, i'll start switching stuff out until it goes away,

[mark]

hey, if you have spare ram, go ahead.

[protegechris]

Tons of it.

Like 4 sticks edo, 2 sdram sticks, a ddr , lol, of course its all ancient.

The computer came with a stick that i replaced , ill try putting that back in.

[Boricuaso]

there is software to test your ram and put it under strees to troubleshoot it. i say do a search on google for like ram diagnostics of some thing in that area i had an aplication for it but dont remember the name, do that before spending your money and or time on replasing the ram, also get a hardware diagnostic software, you never know if your prosesor might be going out or it over heating ,how many applications you got running on the background, there are alot of thing that can make your computer hang,software as well as hardware.

[mark]

http://www.memtest86.com/

[protegechris]

Thanks nobby. I switched out one stick of ram, and after the winodws screen came up with the loader bar, it never moved from that screen, although it acted like it was TRYING to load it never did. I'm tryin with a different stick now, no freezes yet, but I'll give it a day. ill go ahead and rtun those tests as well.

[Rellik]

i'll second memtest86, it helped me identify a bad RAM module that was causing many blue screens on my XP system. too bad it was a 256 meg 133 SDRAM stick

[Atmo]

I dont think it's ram related...

It's most likely a hardware driver issue or perhaps an IRQ sharing problem.

Update your drivers for everything before you go messing around with ram, and check whether your sound and video cards are sharing resources with any other hardware.

[Myxomatosis]

I agree with Atmo, like what happened to me, it would stop whatever it's doing and reboot. After it would start dumping the memory, on that blue screen.

[eleet-2k2]

I'm just curious, why is your video card 11 MB? The problem most likely is hardware related, and could be a failing HDD, but go with Atmo's advice. :)

[will]

Atmo knows.
Problems with RAM usually end in random program crashes and BSODs.

[whiteflip]

Probably not a failing hard drive. It happens to me because my computer is so slow. Something is causing it to think to much so the next segment of your song wont play. Instead it plays the current segement over and over again until winamp is able to access the next part of the song or something. Im such a bad ass computer expert. But yeah if driver updates do not work then go through msconfig (start > run > msconfig) and get rid of some of the start up apps that you dont need.

[ElChevelle]

THIS is bad ram (and bad taste)

http://www.badram.net/images/license%20BadRam2.jpg


You DO NOT have bad ram.
Not sure about your taste though:p

[Smeggle]

no matter what im doing or how much ram and resources are available

you answer your own question in your first statement more or less....nope I agree with Atmo etc not ram...not sure if it's IRQ..that would cause more conflicts than what your getting and you say it's only happening some times?

It's more than likely a software conflict I'd say...or over heating ? when did you last clean your comp? dust in your heat sink fins etc ?

I had stuff like that going on..was told to simply clean it..worked a treat!....

[protegechris]

Originally posted by eleet-2k2
I'm just curious, why is your video card 11 MB? The problem most likely is hardware related, and could be a failing HDD, but go with Atmo's advice. :)

lo,l because i dont have a job to replace it.

I haven't had one freeze since I replaced one of the sticks of ram, ill let ya know if it happens again though.

[Russ]

I've had a problem like this before with dodgy Realtek network drivers - it only manifested itself when something was using the network really hard, and it caused the computer to repeatedly freeze until I rebooted it. I resolved it by buying a decent 3Com network card ;).

[aFfLiCtEd]

Specs:
compaq presario 5000
Pentium 3 700 mhz
256 mb ram
11 MB vid card
2 hard drives, one for radio files, one for o/s and such.

Remove the power cord from the computer . . . then, replace the computer at the end of the power cord. :D

[protegechris]

Unless ur paying for it, hell no.

I only use it to run SAM2 broadcaster, and sometimes surf the web, does the job fine.

Worked hard for it too.

[aFfLiCtEd]

Originally posted by protegechris
Unless ur paying for it, hell no.

I only use it to run SAM2 broadcaster, and sometimes surf the web, does the job fine.
But...
no matter what im doing or how much ram and resources are available, the whole computer just locks up for 10-20 seconds.

Ohh .. ok

[protegechris]

It hasn't locked up since I replaced the stick of RAM the day before yesterday.