I would not have answered this, but since no one else has responded...
First: in regards to your comment "that was one of your reasons..." you need to understand 
how this forum works. The article you read was swritten by the forum's management, 
but they do not contribute to the forum on a daily basis. People just like yourself 
get together and share their combined knowledge and experience through this forum 
so that we can each learn from one another.

Now in regards to your problem. You are really on your own, intermittent reliability 
problems can be a nightmare to solve, almost anything can contribute to your failures. 
So the ability of any forum contributor to offer any real help is extremely limited. 
Sorry

Now here's what I would do:
Check easiest things first
Power supply quality is often overlooked, and may be easy to check. Your motherboard 
MIGHT have the ability to monitor such key parameters as, cpu temperature, fan speeds 
and voltages. If so your motherboard manufacturer MIGHT have software (it sould be 
on CD you received with the computer) that can provide you with a real time monitor 
of these parameters. Computers don't like sudden spikes or drops in voltage.

You could be overheating, especially if it's an AMD cpu. The monitor above would 
help you determine that, you also might be able to read your cpu temperature in one 
of the BIOS setup screens, but that's not as good as the Windows monitor.

Your memory could be not up to the task. I don't know of an inexpensive way to determine 
this. One person that gives a lot od good advice recently suggested to someone that 
they might be able to find a local shop that would test their memory. I haven't found 
a PC test, that would convince me of anything unless the RAM was absolutley trash.

You could have a bad chip (not neccessarily the cpu) on your motherboard, essentially 
impossible to determine without replacing it (the m/b).

You could have a problem with you hard drives, there are some on line testing capabilities 
that I have read about on the forum, but never used. It sounds like they work very 
well. You can probably find them either on your drive manufacturer's web page or 
with a Google search.

You could consider doing a complete clean re-install of Windows, earlier versions 
of windows frequently displayed problems that couldd be remedied this way. I am inclined 
to think that this is not your problem.

You also ought to check to see if you have all of the latest hardware drivers for 
your computer, these can be found at the manufacturer's web page for each component. 
An obsolete driver can produce strange results. This is especially true if you have 
a m/b with a Via chipset and an AMD cpu. A last resort could be to see if the motherboard's 
BIOS is satisfactory with XP. I would not recommend this unless you have run out 
of all options except replacing the motherboard. You can get the software and instructions 
from the manufacturer's web site. You would want to read the associated readme file 
to verify that the update addresses a specific problem that is related to your system.

It might help if you provide more detail about your computer.






On Wednesday, February 26, 2003 at 1:23 am, Neil Morgenstern wrote:
>I have a question about Top 
>reasons for random, fatal crashes in Windows XP and Windows 2000:

>
>I experience random crashing, but it does not blue-screen or reboot, it simply stops 
>dead.
>
>And this will often happen even when I'm doing nothing, i.e. when the machine is 
>left idle (overnight).
>
>It's totally unpredictable - sometimes it stays up for hours and other times it 
crashes 
>within seconds. It can even crash before I have clicked on my name to start up XP.
>
>I do have an NTFS and a FAT32 drive - that was one of your reasons. Is that the 
most 
>likely cause?
>
>I've had this problem for nearly a year now, and I took it to the shop where they 
>sold me the drive and XP, but they couldn't be sure of the cause, and thought there 
>might be disk-corruption on my big drive. I want to make sure before any drastic 
>action is taken.

• Reply or follow-up to this message

• Search this forum
• Start a new thread on a different subject

• Report abuse of the forum