comp freezing

hey, i got a new computer for my birthday a few years ago and one of my parents work associate's built it for me, he bought all the parts from newegg and assembled it. so ever since i've had it its been freezing up quite often. usually 1-4 times per day. i was wondering what could be the problem? i was thinking maybe its a compatibility problem with some of the components, or perhaps my CPU isnt powerful enough. i used to have 1gb of ram but i put in an extra stick to see if it would handle it but it didnt. here are my specs:

OS:Vista Premium x64
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3700+ 2.20 GHz
Motherboard: Biostar GeForce 6100-M9
Memory: 2046 MB
Graphics Card: nVidia GeForce 7600 GT
Hard Drives: 111 GB HD

Computers freezing can be for any number of reasons.
When it freezes is the hard drive light on?
Go into your error logs to see if there is any event data.

try also to update your mobo bios. but save your current bios just to be safe.

Probably the first thing to do is establish that your ram is good.
Running "Memtest86+" would be my first thing to try.
By the way, what brand of memory did you get from New Egg?
There are a few brands that are pure garbage.

Finishing that with NO errors, I'd be running a Hard Drive analysis program.
Every major hard drive mfgr puts out their own version of a hard drive tester program. Like, "Seatools" from Seagate and "MaxBlast" from Maxtor.

Next, just for your information, if you didn't get a SATA2 hard drive, you should have. An IDE hard drive on a Vista system is one HUGE bottleneck.

Then, have you checked to make sure you have the latest Vista drivers for all your hardware as well as the latest BIOS update for your motherboard.

If the system is still under warranty, you might call New Egg and see if they can offer any assistance.

Good Luck,
The Shadow

i have a seagate HD and one of my memory sticks is corsair valueselect and i forgot what the other one was but i think its also corsair.


ok so heres the thing, i set my computer to use the onboard video card and i think it stopped freezing, i ran every program i could think of that froze my computer and it didnt freeze. this tells me that its probably the video card right? so then i uninstalled my driver software and reinstalled and switched back to using my video card and it just froze on me a couple of minutes ago. anyone have a solution?

I was told that you need at least 3 GB memory with vista

Is your power supply strong enough to handle your graphics card?
Also, I don't know whether the 7600 needs an external power connector to it, but you might want to check whether it does. And if it does need the external power (the connector is probably white and at the back of the card) you need to make sure it's connected. The power supply comes in again for this. You should probably have at least a 420 watt power supply for this (but that's a guesstimate, really)

Also, make sure that the graphics card, which seems to be the problem here, has a WORKING cooler. I had a system crash all the time cos the cooler wasn't working properly.

Have you cleaned the computer of dust recently? now would be a good time. Make sure to clean the cooler of the graphics card as well....

There should be NO guesswork regarding the RAM. It should always be installed in exactly Matched Pairs. So if one is Corsair, the other one should be exactly like it.
NO variances are allowed here!

Three gig's of ram may be ideal for Vista, but not mandatory. I've run Vista Ultimate on just two gigs and it runs just fine.

If you use a plug-in Video card, the on-board video must be Disabled in the bios.

Power Supply Wattage?
Don't be misled by the wattage printed on the outside of the PSU. That's the maximum peak wattage the supply is capable of producing, during the one second or so that it takes to start your fans, drives and charge the filter capacitors on your motherboard.
The 'all day' operating wattage can be significantly less, by as much as 30%.
On some cheap supplies, it's even worse!

I just upgraded my own PSU to an "Antec Earthwatts 650".
I previously had a much cheaper 450w supply. I've recently added several new pieces of hardware that all want their share of the PSU, so this new one with three 12v rails, will fill the bill.
You can't have too much power, but you sure as heck can have too little!

On the Video Card fan issue..... I just found an AGP video card in my junk drawer that I wanted to use, but the little fan was frozen solid. (would not turn)
I removed the fan from the heatsink and cleaned the fan and heatsink, then I injected some high-grade light machine oil into the bearing on the back of the fan,
with a hypodermic needle. After spinning the blades by hand for a few minutes the bearing freed up and the little fan now runs like a new one.
That little video card is now running just fine, in one of my test machines.
Many of those little video card fans are so cheap that they will only run for a year or so without maintenance. (clean & oil)
I clean and oil all the fans (9) in my main system about twice a year, to keep everything running smooth and quiet.

Never overlook the obvious.....a stuck Video Card fan, or CPU fan, can shut you right down.
Likewise, dirty ram will also fail.
Ram usually sits right next to the CPU and gets blasted with dirt, from the CPU cooling fan. The dirt can short out the little legs on the ram chips, causing ram failure. It doesn't take much!
I've saved hundreds of sticks of ram over the past 28 years, by just washing it.
Likewise the ram chips on video cards. I'm still using a video card that I had to wash about 4 years ago.

I hope all this helps someone....somewhere.

Cheers mates!
The Shadow

ok well my PSU is 550 watt. ill check on the video card fan and ill clean out all the dust tonite.

You're running Vista 64 on a single-core cpu with less than an optimal amount of RAM and have not yet gone through this very well written guide: Speed Up the Performance of Vista

Anyway, just my $0.02 as to what the problem could be.