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"Random Locking PC"

One of my PC's at home has starting locking randomly, thought no problem, probably something dodgy caught off Kazaa or something, formatted hard drive and tried to reinstall Windows etc still had problems looks like it is a hardware problem that has developed in a matter of days, Memory, HD, Fans, Leads etc all seem to be working OK.
I know it's a bit vague but any jaw dropping ideas ?

The problem is it used to be a general system benchmark. Your score depended severely on overall how good your system was, and a faster chip/more aggressive RAM/system tweaking would always give you quite a few more marks. With the new version it's almost entirely dependant on your graphics card, which frankly sucks. Not to mention the bias claims that have been made by nVidia.

Actually i would agree with that as it is supported for direct x 9, although i don't care much about the SSE2 bit as my P4 has it the new AMD "hammers" will also intergrate it.

c.b.

No, 3DMARK2003 is an appalling benchmark and is biased towards ATI cards. 2001SE was a bad benchmark as it is, god knows why so many people used it, but 2003 is truly awful with some major flaws. I'm sticking to things like SS2, UT2K3 and Codecreatures/etc until 2003SE comes out.

Have you downloaded the new 3dmark 2003 yet it is pretty wicked.

c.b.

I had random freezing ptoblems in XP for a while. I isolated the problem to the 40.41 detenators I was using. I'm now on 41.09s (much to my disgust) and it works fine. I'm currently downloading the new 42.82s though.

Found the problem, it is my PNY graphics card bought last October, the fan is working fine but when I took this card out and used an old display card everything works fine.
Needless to cay card is on its way back to store/PNY.

cheers

I think it is a memory problem, will clean everything tonight and reseat memory sticks - will let you know tomorrow, thanks for your help.

Thanks mate :), your no so bad yourself.

c.b.

AMD MAN is great :o)

oh not the old random restart problem :), As you have already said it is most likely a hardware problem as it does it on a clean install, as delta said it is most likely heat, check that your CPU heatsink and fan is'nt badly clogged up with dust and that the fan still spins, try reseating the ram, what is the spec of your system?, do you have the capabilty's on your motherboard for temperature monitoring? if so then download a piece of software called Hmonitor from here...

http://members.lycos.co.uk/burntsilicon/viewtopic.php?t=9

(another shameless plug :)

and this software will run in windows and tell you the heat of your cpu, also can you give us more info like, does it only do it in windows? does it do it in a game or on the internet? how often does it do it and then we will try helping you more.

c.b.