My PC has long suffered from elusive freezes, with no obvious pattern. Now I've got something that causes it systematically : trying to start gqcam causes the whole system to go instantly in hard freeze.

My question is how do I figure what could be causing that ? Any idea of what monitoring I could do ?

Thanks for reading

It sounds like a power issue to me. If gqcam is activating a USB device that's drawing power, that MAY be a problem.

Sometimes power issues can manifest as freezes or random reboots.

Usually calculators like this can be helpful, and pretty accurate:
http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/

If you are drawing more on your setup than what your supply is rated for, that may be a problem.

If you recently installed memory or something, see if you can find voltage specs of the processor or memory - you may be able to tweak those in BIOS to reduce problems.

Before buying a new power supply, try disconnecting some hardware that you don't often use to see if the freezes decrease.

If you built this computer (or maybe even if you didn't) check for electrical shorts (like screws mounted on the backside of the motherboard).

My guess is that it may either be overheating, or that your RAM has issues. What are your normal system temperatures? Have you run memtest?

dukeinlondon

I mistakenly overclocked my FSB to high and suffered from random freeze-up. Running MemCheck indicated bad RAM. However, backing down the overclock fixed the pboblem and nothing was wrong with the DDRam.

Best regards,

Marvinudy

I have already explored overheating and I don't think I have that problem : CPU temp is 48C. I brought it down from about 60C by buying and excellent and quite CPU FAN. I've changed the memory some time ago but that hasn't made much of a difference: the freeze are still few and far between. I'll still do a mem test just to make sure because I've noticed that some JAVA programs seem to manage to cause it too, and they use a lot of memory.... Maybe anyway.

Power, I don't think is a factor : it'd be happening when I burn CDs no ?

I don't even know how to do this sort of things

I've done a mem test and I have a question : should it finish regardless of the state of the memory or is it going to fail if the memory is faulty ? I thought not but I may be wrong.

Yep, the memtest locks up at 12 % of the test number 5. Is it possible that it's something on the motherboard that is faulty ?