[computerwiz12890]

I'm at a friends house right now. His computer freezes after being idle for about an hour. Nothing will unfreeze it, except for restarting the computer.

His power settings only turn off the monitor after 20 minutes, his settings don't turn off the hard disks. His CPU fan is working, and the temperature of the MB stays around 90 F, and his CPU around 110 F (It's been about 25 minutes). I am currently testing his RAM and other components for problems.

He has Windows XP Professional SP2. He has the security center's firewall running, Kaspersky anti-virus, Ad-aware, and Spybot.

I've run all the anti-spyware, CWS Shredder, anti-virus, and all that good stuff. He has a very clean computer. His HTJ log is nice and short too . I really doubt it is a malware problem.

Any help would be appreciated.

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His computer freezes after being idle for about an hour. Nothing will unfreeze it, except for restarting the computer.

So if he keeps on using the computer there are no problems ?
Is Hibernate unchecked ?

Edited by peterm, 17 September 2005 - 03:13 PM.

[peterm]

His computer freezes after being idle for about an hour. Nothing will unfreeze it, except for restarting the computer.

So if he keeps on using the computer there are no problems ?
Is Hibernate unchecked ?

Edited by peterm, 17 September 2005 - 03:13 PM.

[computerwiz12890]

So if he keeps on using the computer there are no problems ?
Is Hibernate unchecked ?

That's correct. If he uses it, it is fine. And hibernate is unchecked. I know...it's a strange problem.

[peterm]

Humour me
change the monitor setting to never.
have you checked the event viewer for error messages

[computerwiz12890]

Alright, I'll do that, but he says he's done it before, but it didn't help. As for the event viewer, I found quite a bit of errors and warnings, but I can't make heads or tails about what it means.

[peterm]

we are looking for errors at the time of the freeze
since it happens after an hour let it lockup restart then look at the last message with a red X what is the source and the event number

[computerwiz12890]

Since the problems started occuring at about the time we installed Kaspersky anti-virus, I decided to remove it and install AVG. After AVG was installed and updated, it froze after being idle for about 4 minutes. I went to the event viewer and it appears to be something called ACPI. Here's what it says:


AMLI: ACPI BIOS is attempting to read from an illegal IO port address (0x71), which lies in the 0x70 - 0x71 protected address range. This could lead to system instability. Please contact your system vendor for technical assistance.


Hope it's nothing too bad. Thanks.

[peterm]

Ok the BIOS needs to be updated
the bios that is running is not really XP compatiable
yes I know he has been running XP before BUT.
Get the bios info and see if the Manufactuer has an update
Light reading
More light reading

[computerwiz12890]

He also said that he thinks the other user accounts work fine. But the bios is still most likely the problem, right? I'll call him and get the bios information and post a reply by Friday, if not sooner.

Thanks