Ok, this all started up about a week or two ago. My computer will act completly normal all day, and then at any random time, it will freeze up two or more programs. I'll be on UER or something and it will just lock up. I almost lost a report for my english class tonight when it froze, but after many attempts to fix it, some with my fist, it still keeps freezing up. I'm thinkng of backing everything up and reinstalling windows right now, but I dont want to lose all of my stuff. And I'm getting really tired of hitting it. Has anyone else had this problem, or know what the problem might be? Any help would be great.
-Patrick

Verify that everything appears to be working correctly in device manager. If that's the case, then go ahead and reformat. If it's still having a problem after that, it's a hardware problem. In which case you'll have to strip it down to bare min operating specs and gradually build it back up troubleshooting which part it could be.

Before doing a reformat I would check a few things. First make sure your CPU fan is still running properly and is not full of dust. Second, run a memory check with memtest http://www.memtest86.com/ to make sure your ram is ok. CPU overheating and bad memory are two big causes of random lockups. Finally do a full spyware scan.

If that doesn't resolve it then try a reformat. If you still get lockups after that then as Kenshin pointed out then you have a hardware problem. Likely suspects after the ones above are bad power supply or motherboard problems.

Posted by Washu Before doing a reformat I would check a few things. First make sure your CPU fan is still running properly and is not full of dust. Second, run a memory check with memtest http://www.memtest86.com/ to make sure your ram is ok. CPU overheating and bad memory are two big causes of random lockups. Finally do a full spyware scan. If that doesn't resolve it then try a reformat. If you still get lockups after that then as Kenshin pointed out then you have a hardware problem. Likely suspects after the ones above are bad power supply or motherboard problems.

That's a good point. It's a good idea to check all that little stuff before formatting.

ok, I took the case off and verified that the CPU fan is running properly. I was going to check the device manager, but it seems I cant even open that up. ctrl+alt+delete doesn't work for some reason. Spyware is ok, so I'm going to run a memory test and see if that does anything.

It's sounding more and more like your Windows install is hosed.

Get linux

or if that doesn't work:

get rid of windows xp and go back to an earlier version and download all the patches and service packs. I like Windows 2KPro

XP Pro is actually fairly reasonable. It is just as easy to hose over a 2k install vs. an XP install. I do know from experience. XP does have a much better hardware abstraction layer then 2k does and in my experience is generally much more stable and much less prone to memory leaks then 2k Pro. The issue is that XP does take significantly heavier duty hardware to run well. On a machine that's running 256 megs of ram or less, I would be more prone to run 2k.

Geeze, if proggies are freezing, grab memtest86 and run it. if it spits up then you have bad stick of RAM.

Posted by Jesus Jones Geeze, if proggies are freezing, grab memtest86 and run it. if it spits up then you have bad stick of RAM.

I'm just going to do that, Windows XP worked fine up until a few weeks ago, theres no need to do all that excess stuff if I installed the memory wrong.