Win XP help, random freezes (+ tweeking tips)

[Waccoon]

I think this is a critical update issue with the Pentium 4.

My dad has had a P4 runing XP service pack 1, for over 6 months and it has worked very well.  In fact, the speed and noise levels of his system encouraged me to trade up my Athlon for a P4 (and now I'm quite sorry).

About a month ago, he started complaining about sudden freezes, where the mouse would lock up for about a second or so.  This happens regularly about every 15 seconds or so for a few minutes, then it would go away.  Recently, within the last few weeks, he started complaining about hard resets.  Not the BSOD, not a lock-up, but a hard, sudden reset, with no hard drive access, like you pushed the reset button.  He has an Asus board with Corsair memory and an Antec power supply.  This is NOT cheap hardware, so I was quite baffled.

After "upgrading" from an Athlon to a P4 2.4, I started having similar problems with Win2K service pack 4.  Sound in Mediaplayer and Goldwave would skip for no reason, I started getting the BSOD frequently (which I didn't get for 2 years with my Athlon).  For the hell of it, I re-installed my system to clean out all the Athlon stuff left behind and did all the WindowsUpdates.  Now my system still crashes occasionally, and now gives me the dreaded 1-minute shutdown notice from TASKMGR.EXE.  I've gotten that one twice in the last week and it's really getting on my nerves.  Memtest86 shows no problem with my memory.  FlashPlayer6 (several revisions) are well known to crash like crazy on the P4, but that's all I know.

I really want to know if this is a P4 issue, or if MS is screwing things up, again.  If this keeps happening, I might just call my P4 a loss and see if my old Athlon 2600+ fares better.

[Waccoon]

Different mobos, no overclocking, updated BIOS.  The only thing I can think of is that my dad isn't terribly knowledgeable about computers, and my system has some server stuff running in the background, namely Apache 2.0 and WinMySQLAdmin.  I just re-installed my system and all my drivers are up to date, except my nVidia drivers, since I hear the newer Detonator drivers are pretty buggy.  Also, my CPU and mobo temps are OK.

Correction:  It's not Taskmgr.exe that's the problem.  The exact error I get for the 1-minute shutdown notice is:

The system process "C:\WINNT\system32\services.exe" terminated unexpectedly with status code 128.  The system will now shut down and restart.

I've gotten that error 3 times today and I'm getting really annoyed.

Logitec seems OK in my book so long as you avoid their bloated drivers.  I mean, their driver pack for a PS/2 wheel mouse for NT4 is over 6 megs.  WTF?!

[Waccoon]

@Paul_Gadd:  Thanks!  Unfortunately, I didn't see anything there besides my two CD-ROMs and Zip250 drive, and the paths are correct.

I did realize, though, that I had a Playstation disc in the first CD-ROM, because I was using it with the ePSXe emulator.  Still, I did have this problem last week, before downloading ePSXe.

[Waccoon]

Event viewer shows hundreds of red X's trying to access the CD-ROM.  If the Playstation emulator isn't causing that, I guess that's my problem.

Glaucus:  I find it does a much better job of fixing things from the recovery console.

Anything in particular?  Chkdsk from the command line seems to work fine for me, so long as you schedule a disk check on reboot.  The GUI version of chkdsk is useless, and will actually IGNORE any error it can't fix.  Stupid.

Is there any way to save a log when running chkdsk?  Scandisk under Win98 always told you what it fixed, but chkdsk never seems to give you any useful information unless it's related to partitions.