In January I purchased a Systemax computer with an AMD Athalon processor, Windows XP Home, MS Office 2003 Professional. Since turning on the computer I have had constant problems with it freezing. Sometimes it evens reboots itself - the screen goes black and then it boots. When it reboots, most often a message appears saying the system has recovered from a "serious error". When it merely freezes and I have to manually reboot, it usually does a disk/file scan.
Anyway, I have talked with Systemax tech service, but they are blaming it on a software problem. However, I don't have much extra software installed and it is nothing that wasn't on my old computer which did not act this way.
Any suggestions on what might be causing the computer to freeze/reboot at random and any solutions to the problem?

Did the computer come with software/os installed? Or did you get it and install stuff yourself? Also what extra hardware do you have in it or hooked up to it?

Need to get a little more info.

- Lotus

My guess is a bad memory chip.

Don't buy Systemax systems again, they suck

If you want simple and good tech support, just get a Dell or something like that -- easy and they aren't afraid of sending you replacement parts.

Lotus - Because I didn't want all the extraneous garbage, I had it built to my specs. Here are the system specs for my "Tiger XP2600 System" - built by Systemax.

Mid-Tower ATX Chassis w/300W PS nForce2 Motherboard
AMD Athlon XP2600+ 333FSB Processor
512MB DDR333 PC2700 Non-ECC Memory
160GB Ultra ATA (7200rpm) Hard Drive
Geforce 4 MX440-T8X 64MB AGP Card w/ TV-Out
52X32X52/16X Combo Drive
4X DVD-/+ R/RW Drive
56K V.92 PCI Modem
Logitech iTouch Keyboard
Systemax Mouse
Windows XP Home Edition
MS Office Professional 2003
Adobe Acrobat Reader


I installed the following (note: as mentioned in my initial posting, these were installed on my old Hewlitt-Packard system and caused no problems):

Norton AntiVirus
FinePx Viewer (for Fuji digital camera)
Lexmark Z32-Z22 Color Printer
Enter.net - ISP - w/ "Propel Accelerator"

Because of the continuing problems, I have purposely kept my computer as "clean" as possible.

Originally posted by Lacychels:

"Since turning on the computer I have had constant problems with it freezing. Sometimes it evens reboots itself - the screen goes black and then it boots. When it reboots, most often a message appears saying the system has recovered from a "serious error". When it merely freezes and I have to manually reboot, it usually does a disk/file scan."

This is usually due to a driver that has issues... you can utilize the verbose mode of bootup to help diagnose this via the /SOS switch in boot.ini to see what the last driver attempting to load is.

There are various 'debugging' bootup switches that boot.ini has you can find online to try this.

F8 key mode bootup of the system also has options for this, seeing what drivers are loading & can help you determine which is the 'offending party' here as well, iirc.

Originally posted by Lacychels:

"Anyway, I have talked with Systemax tech service, but they are blaming it on a software problem."

They're doubtless right. I'd say the same... trick is, finding out WHICH is the one doing you in here. Often, this means using debug bootups, watching which drivers are the last ones attempting to load before the system spontaneously reboots on you to help you determine which is the 'bad' one.

Originally posted by Lacychels:

"However, I don't have much extra software installed and it is nothing that wasn't on my old computer which did not act this way.
Any suggestions on what might be causing the computer to freeze/reboot at random and any solutions to the problem?
"

No ideas on which is going nuts on you, but I did offer some methods above to diagnose this with, or at least how I would approach attempting to debug which software you may need a patch for on its drivers etc.

(Upgrades to the software in question, once you determine which it is, is what you would pursue once you zero-in on the offending process... if this is a no go & it still continues, I would suggest finding an alternate software for that purpose!)

Recovery Console is your buddy here too!

It has the LISTSVC command which will list the drivers &/or services your system loads (or does not load as well) & will allow you to turn off/on any & all of them as you need to.

Find the bogus software that is failing on load, & use the DISABLE command to stall it from loading so you can try to logon to your system after using disable command in Recovery Console (RC) & uninstall the offending software (OR, download a patch for it or newer model as an alternate course of action).

Takes time, some analysis work, but it is doable... I too, would say you have a driver or service in some software you use that needs patch (or, replacement).

APK

Do you by any chance have the "fast write" option enabled for your video card? That option tends to make some systems very unstable. Aside from that, Alec's post above will lead you in the right direction. Keep us updated on your progress.