Recently we purchased some computer components for my Father's computer, as his last one had seemingly died. Whilst all this is well and good, once assembled we noticed some oddities. The computer would randomly lock-up, usually during tasks such as installing and uninstalling, although sometimes it would just lock-up whilst idle. Once locked-up, the computer would not respond at all, no input responses at all and a hard reset is required, usually this temporarily cures the problem until it happens again and needs another reset. We thought it may be the power supply, however we're not too sure. Anyone any ideas? Components: Intel D101GGC Motherboard Intel Pentium 4 Processor 1GB RAM 80GB Western Digital SATA HDD
A faulty PSU is more likely to shut the machine off rather than lock it up. One of the easiest things to check is your RAM. This software takes a while, so you may want to run this overnight.
You might want to check your hard disk too for damaged sectors. Run a checkdisk or open a shell and run chkdsk /r so that it will find bad sectors and attempt to repair them. If your system locks up during the check, then it's probably an hard disk problem. When there's a RAM problem you generally end up with a blue screen rather than a lock up. If you have two banks, I suggest trying to swap them and see if the random lock ups still happen. Lastly, I would try to update the BIOS if an update is available.
