The problem started when I was playing a game. I noticed my tower was getting hot, which is not uncommon but eventually my game froze. I wasn't able to Alt+Tab or Ctr+Alt+Delete out, so I had to hard reset it. It booted fine and was able to load Windows, however within minutes it froze again. After restarting it again, it Posted up, but when it went to load Windows, it hung at a black screen.
I've tried loading with Safe Mode, it would freeze on crcdisk.sys and wouldn't go on past that. I tried using both a Windows Vista disk, and a Vista Recovery Disk, however it would freeze as it was loading the files. My friend and myself tried looking on-line for solutions, and we found a lot of various ways to try. We tried booting with the on-board video card, nothing. We tried using each RAM stick individually, nothing. We tried disabling on-board features in BIOS such as sound, LAN, and the USB controller, nothing.
Then we finally tried reducing the CPU Multiplier in BIOS to the minimum available, 5x at the minimum 200 MHz. We were finally able to load Windows normally. Then we tried increasing the multiplier closer to its default. The highest we could boot from was 10x, however it would still freeze with simply Internet Explorer running. right now i have the side off with a fan blowing into the tower to prevent any overheating, however the computer still locks up randomly with little to no processor strain.
Any ideas / solutions? I would love to be able to boot with normal, or close to normal parameters and still have a stable OS.
OS: Windows Vista Home, 32bit
Service Pack 3
Custom Built
Processor: AMD athlon 64 2X Dual Core Processor 6000+
RAM: 4GB RAM DDR2
Hard Drive: Hitachi 7200 rpm 500GB
Sound: on-board
Video Card:Nvidia Gforce 250gtx 1gig
1 user