Last night, while I was playing Warhammer, my PC locked up. Not a complete lock; I could still move my mouse, but that's all I could do. Everything else was completely frozen. So I shut down, and when I tried to start it back up, when it tried to boot from my hdd, it gave me a "File disk read error, press ctrl+alt+del to restart" continually. I uneventfully tried a couple of the HDD diagnostic tools from the Ultimate Boot CD, but it seemingly had no effect. But the next time I restarted it, it booted fine.

So I go and check who got booted from my TS server, and jumped in to play some TF2 with them a bit. That played fine for a few hours. No lockups, no crashes, everything peachy. When we were all done with that, I decided to load of Adobe Illustrator for some late night drawing. I get ready to drag over set of new colors into my swatch, and bam! It locks up again. Able to move my mouse, but completely locked. I shut down, restarted, and it booted up fine with no errors this time.

So I just let my system run idling overnight. I woke up this morning to see that my system locked up yet again, at 7:10am (when it was really 9:45am). Mouse able to move, but that's it. Shut down, restarted, booted back up fine.


Now my question is I'm not exactly sure WTF is causing this. At first, I suspected my hard drive, after that initial "File disk read error", but I'm not entirely sure now. My system wasn't overheating either. Why was it fine with TF2, but lock up in Illustrator? Could it be memory? That would be a very viable suspect. I bought 2 1gb sticks of ram last week. 1 of them turned ended up dying after being in my system for 10 hours. Yes they are both the correct speeds, correct voltage, supported by the mobo, etc. If anyone has any ideas of what this could be... brainstorm away.

Last new change I've made to my system in the last 2 months was just the RAM. Everything else has stayed the same. I'll check the voltages again after this virus scan is done.

Dave if that was the case I would have expected him to see this issue in the past....

I would check the RAM first.  A good tool for that is MemTest 86 (http://www.memtest86.com/ - Free Download).  If that comes back alright, then start with some HDD diagnostic tools (the manufacturer of your drive should have some tools on their website).  For your sake I hope they come back with something, because lockups like that are usually hardware related and these are your cheapest things to replace.

If you don't find anything wrong with your RAM or HDD, let me know and we'll keep chasing this rabbit down the hole.


As a side note, I have never seen this but I have read about thermal paste drying out over time... Just something small to check.

I would still do the testing that I mentioned above... it should only take a few hours and you can just do the tests overnight if needed.

If this is a hardware issue I would guarantee that it didn't go away, its just hiding for the time being.... Computers dont fix themselves unless you got some pr0nzware on your system and now you cleaned it all out.

If I do have any on my system, it would have been from your DC++ listing

Very nice.... but my server is kept quite clean, with routine virus/spyware/malware scans..

Starting to think that it was just BB that caused the issue. I have had BlackBox freeze on me before with similar signs. Desktop freezes, mouse still moves, but could usually get out of it by ctrl+alt+deleting. When I shut my system down the first time it occurred, I saw a flash of the BSOD stop error screen as it went down. Might have been that the hard shutdown borked something in windows (have had similar happen before). But I ran memtest86, and a couple other tests with no red flags. So thinking that the bbLeanSkin plugin is still the bitch that it's always been. There are probably other factors involved, but nothing that I can pinpoint.