At 18:22 06/23/05, Peter Shkabara wrote:
>Thanks for the input Mark, but I have a question to follow up on this. Are
>you saying that the video driver can cause a complete lockup of the OS? In
>other words, not just the video stopping, but all other functions as well.
>This seems to be the case in my situation. Actually, all I can say is that
>the keyboard is frozen too, but can't say about other processes
>necessarily.
>I have seen situations before where the console was locked up, but the OS
>kept running providing, in my case, dialup RAS service. I could log onto
>my computer remotely, but not at the keyboard. This was for another
>machine entirely, however.


Hi Peter

A similar thing happened to me last week. My Windows 2000 was freezing
within five minutes of starting up. I wasn't sure whether I had a
software problem (Windows itself) or a hardware problem (bad memory,
fan or heat problem, loose connection somewhere,...).

After checking connections and fans and swapping out memory chips, the
problem was still there...and getting worse. The freezing was happening
sooner after starting up. Finally the freezes started happening seconds
into POST. So I knew then that it wasn't a software problem.

At this point, it occurred to me that it could be the video freezing...
and a change of video card did fix the problem. I figure that either
chips on the video card were fried (Asus GeForce FX5700 AGP card) or
the on board fan was failing. (I'm ashamed to say that I didn't check
the fan on the video card while the card was still in the computer. I
can spin the fan blades easily with my fingers...but I'm not going to
waste more time on this card.)

So maybe it's just your screen that's frozen (due to failure of the
video card or its fan) and not Windows itself. If you're careful, you
can test this by using the keyboard to try a blind shut down. (The
screen may be frozen but the mouse and keyboard may still work. So
while you can't see changes on screen when you use the keyboard, you
can still hit the correct sequence of keys to try and shut down.

The following is for Windows 2000. You can figure out what keys to use
for the other versions of windows.

Hit <Ctrl><Esc> to expand the Start menu. Hit the <up arrow> key once
to highlight "Shutdown" (in the Start Menu). Hit <Enter> to execute
Shutdown. This would normally bring up a menu where you can choose
"Shutdown", "Reboot", or "Log Off". Hit <Enter> again to "OK" the
default value...which should be "Shutdown", unless you've done a warm
reboot since you last powered down. If so, you'd need to remember that
and hit the <up arrow> key once to move from "Reboot" to "Shutdown".)

So <Ctrl><Esc> then <Up arrow> then <Enter> then <Enter>. You can do
these blindly and if your computer shuts down, you know your video was
frozen but not all of Windows itself.

Also, it's always a good idea to try a blind shutdown before using the
Reset button when Windows becomes non-responsive. Hit Reset too many
times and Windows could become corrupted.

Regards,
Bill

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