DescentBB

About three weeks ago it started freezing up intermittantly. No keyboard or mouse control. I'd reboot and it would be ok, so I wrote it off as a strange thing that comps do once in a while. Now it's gone hardcore. Immediately on bootup or within five minutes it freezes. Yesterday afternoon I booted into safe mode. No freeze. Ran AVG Anti-virus and MS Anti-spyware. Nothing found. Ran Regseeker and cleaned the registry. Booted back to regular mode and it was fine the rest of the night. Today it's doing again even after booting in and out of safe mode. The only thing I've done is, after the problem started, I installed updated nForce2 drivers.

ECS N2U400A
AMD XP3200+
Corsair PC3200 - 512Mb
ATI 9500Pro soft modded to 9700Pro - AGP
SBLive 5.1 X-gamer in slot 4
MGE 400W PSU
WD 60Gb HDD
WinXP Home - SP2

Can you drop the video card back to 9500 speeds? Perhapse it's starting to have problems with the overclock. You should probably try dropping everything back to defualt speeds if anything else is OCed.

I had something similar with my work computor. Got a new vid card and no problems since.

check to see if you're getting good air circulation.

check the system log under management

then do the irish jig for good measure if your still unsure, leaving a fruit basket for the computer as an offering might help

Setting the O/C back to normal. The first place you start hardware wise is power supply if there are no driver issues

I set the card back to defaults. No help. I uninstalled the card and swapped it out with a Voodoo3. Still freezes so I guess it's not the card. I did a system restore to one month back with same results. Checked voltages at the ATX connector. All good. Event Viewer shows red alerts for DCOM and Service Control. Any more suggestions?

Strange thing is, if I leave it in safe mode long enough, everything is ok. It did it yesterday and is doing it again now.

Corrupt registry? Try reinastall?

Really though, I reinstall XP once every 6 to 12 months to get rid of problems like this.

Good luck ...

Ok, thanx for the suggestions. Without going into all the gory details, I found I have a mobo that won't run at 400FSB. I will run just fine at 333. Found this out after playing with safe mode and fail-safe defaults. Confirmed it by swapping out a spare N2U400-A board that I have which is now running very happily at 400FSB.

Now, to pour a little salt in the wound, I've found that ECS doesn't extend their one year warranty to the end user, and the supplier I bought it from only warranties boards for 90 days, so I'm SOL. Don't think I'll be buying any more ECS products in the future.