- Ran Check Disk and no problems found.
- Downloaded Seatools for Windows since the drive is a Seagate and ran the long test on it and no problems found as well as the system didnt lock up during this period either and acted healthy.
- Downloaded Performance Monitor from Hexagora which has a Hard Drive activity graph to see if there is actually hard drive activity seen by the OS when the HDD LED goes solid and system becomes unresponsive other than mouse movement etc.
http://www.hexagora.com/en_dw_davperf.asp*Going to keep Performance Monitor running and next time it locks up and is unresponsive but mouse movement still able to move, see if the graph shows actual hard drive activity or if nothing is showing on the graph but graph might still be running. While this isnt a solution I am really curious if the hard drive is actually active or if the HDD LED is just showing a solid lit state because of the problem the hardware has. If I see hard drive activity on the graph to support the HDD LED being solid as ok something is going on thats bringing the system to its knees then I can go in that direction, but if the graph shows that its logging but no activity and the HDD LED is solid then I might be dealing with a Motherboard failure, however I would swap out my hard drive first just to be sure that everything points back to the main board as the issue.
Also not discussed prior but to mention now, the CPU/GPU temps are all fine so its not overheating and locking up. Figured I'd update this to let you all know where I am at with this and if there are any other suggestions I will give them a try. Starting to get a sense that well I got what i paid for, cheap computer likely is cheap and wont last, but Gigabyte motherboard while they do have some boards that die, I didnt expect after about a year of somewhat heavy use for it to crap out on me. I like the fact that it doesnt use much electricity and is plenty of processing power to do most of what I do including light gaming.
If all else fails I will decommission this system and put a laptop in place of it that is an electron sipper. I have been eyeballing my one Core i5 laptop with thoughts of placing its guts inside a minitower case. Its the Lenovo that i have the Pentium 4 massive heatsink attached to because it use to have an overheating issue which is why i got it for free, and keyboard set to side so the heatsink is attached to top of the CPU. I can hide the ugly mod in a desktop case and run it as a desktop computer. Solder the soft power button wires to the power push button of laptop and run all the cables through the open card slots at the rear of it. I can use a USB/IDE adapter to use a desktop 5.25" DVD ROM and a power brick that I have that makes a single P-connector to power the Desktop DVD-RW IDE drive. Just havent put the time into it yet to make a new frankenstein box.