sometimes freezes, sometimes won't reboot-no patrn

[binkybear7]

i'm lost - i received an hp pavilion desktop with "issues" - this computer intermittently freezes (usually occurs when i'm "trying to do too many things at once" or have a couple programs open (but not the SAME programs each time) or when i'm trying to open another program or window and haven't waited for the first one to ***completely*** finish loading.

then, when it freezes, i can't turn it off and must unplug it.

then, when i try to turn it back on, sometimes it doesn't respond at all, sometimes i'll get a bunch of long and short beeps, sometimes it turns back on fine. if it doesn't turn back on, i sometimes need to try up to 3 or 4 more times to get it to turn on.

then, when it does turn on, it often gets "stuck" at the "checkdisk" stage while checking c: drive and it won't move beyond about 30% - but it **will** let me hit 'cancel' and skip the rest of the check. when i have to do that, i immediately follow up by doing a proper shutdown/restart, usually with no problem whatsoever.   :-/

i'm running windows me and the software that came with the hp pavilion; i also have a few other programs, like aol, aim, windows media player, mcafee online. i have done all windows updates. there is one 80GB hard drive with two partitions - c: 20 GB andd: 60 GB. i believe there's 512 ram and i think it's a pentium 850 (not positive tho).

my thought is that it might be a PSU issue - any thoughts?? my aunt used this computer for 2 years and said she had a problem for some of that time with not being able to turn it on, but she says she didn't have the issues with freezing (she's a much more basic user that i am, though - i use computers pretty long and hard!)

any other thoughts or suggestions??

[compEngineer0]

well as to the freezing... this is usually determined by your hardware capabilities / software you are trying to use. To resolve this, your options are pretty much add more hardware or use less programs. You might want to run Adaware or Spybot to make sure junkware isn't slowing you down. A lot of times antivirus does constant background scanning to that can slow you down. One thing that might help to is just a complete format / reinstall, that might help both problems. Just burn off anything you don't want to lose to CD or whatever and then try formatting and reinstalling Windows. The power supply might be the problem, but it's hard to say for sure w/o testing. They aren't that expensive so just go buy one and try it. If the prob fixes then you're set and if it doesnt, then just keep the psu or return it note: rather than unplugging have you tried holding in the power button for 5-10 secs. normally that'll force a power down rather than having to reach around and unplug, just for convienence.

[binkybear7]

Thanks! I actually do run adaware, so that's not it.

The computer was doing this freeze-on-off-on stuff even after I'd reformated and just loaded the original software - in fact, it kept doing it during the process of reloading the software (returning to mfr original config) - my nephew couldn't get past that, so they gave the computer to me; I had the same problems, but I managed to get past it by **manually** partitioning the hard drive into two sections and I made sure that the c: drive partition was big enough to hold the software (I made it 20GB) because during the software installation process, it kept making that partition too small (like 786 kb or something ridiculous). My aunt had the computer and had totally different software on it than I do (except the original OS and resident software) - she had the same problem even with the different software.

I've tried turning off McAfee virus because that does tend to slow the computers down, but that made no difference. I've tried holding the power button in for a looong time, much longer than 5-10 seconds, and that also does not work, I **must** unplug sometimes or it just won't turn off at all. very weird.

I just bought a power supply tester, so I'll try testing that - I hope the tester is reliable!

[compEngineer0]

ok, well let me know what this power supply tester thing says... and by pentium 850 do you mean 850MHz or is that just the chipset or both? cause if you only have 850Mhz that could be a lot of your speed problem. 850 is not a whole lot to work with and you really can't expect to do much multitasking on it.

[GX1_Man]

I disagree. A PIII-800 is more than enough to do most anything except extreme graphics projects and gaming even with 128 RAM if you use Win2000 or earlier. With more RAM, even XP (uggh!) is tolerable.

Word Processing, email, and internet is fine with a PII-350 and better and a high speed connection. You can only type so fast....