A couple weeks ago or so, my computer began to lock up for no apparent reason. It's built for gaming and I've never had a problem with it before, and don't overclock anything.
What I've found is that whenever it freezes, it's because my CPU (AMD Athlon II X4 640, 4 cores, 3GHz) suddenly drops to 0% usage. My temperature monitor confirms that it's not overheating, but just to be on the safe side I gave my case fans an extra cleaning, as well as the CPU fan and the heatsink. (I haven't tried applying a new coat of thermal paste yet, but if it's not overheating then I doubt that would help anyway)
That did not work. So I tried to uninstall some of the recent things I'd put on my computer, including some codec packs, recent games, and various other things, all of which had no effect. Google Chrome seems to cause the most lockups, but they aren't exclusive to that.
I can do something as simple as right-click my taskbar and watch as the computer freezes up, sometimes going a full two minutes before it un-freezes. At its worst, the cursor stops moving. Sometimes when it happens, it's because of a sound the computer is trying to play, but doesn't. I have an onboard sound card (not sure of the model, it's just called VIA High Definition Audio in dxdiag). When it hangs on a sound, it will skip and continue looping the last second or so of sound that was playing before the new sound finally loads up and unclogs the system. Could the soundcard have something to do with it?
But the most important question is, what would cause a quad-core processor to just completely stop working if it's not overheating?
Full specs:
Win 7 64-bit
4 GB RAM
AMD Athlon II X4 640, 4 cores, 3GHz
nVidia GeForce GTX 560
What I've found is that whenever it freezes, it's because my CPU (AMD Athlon II X4 640, 4 cores, 3GHz) suddenly drops to 0% usage. My temperature monitor confirms that it's not overheating, but just to be on the safe side I gave my case fans an extra cleaning, as well as the CPU fan and the heatsink. (I haven't tried applying a new coat of thermal paste yet, but if it's not overheating then I doubt that would help anyway)
That did not work. So I tried to uninstall some of the recent things I'd put on my computer, including some codec packs, recent games, and various other things, all of which had no effect. Google Chrome seems to cause the most lockups, but they aren't exclusive to that.
I can do something as simple as right-click my taskbar and watch as the computer freezes up, sometimes going a full two minutes before it un-freezes. At its worst, the cursor stops moving. Sometimes when it happens, it's because of a sound the computer is trying to play, but doesn't. I have an onboard sound card (not sure of the model, it's just called VIA High Definition Audio in dxdiag). When it hangs on a sound, it will skip and continue looping the last second or so of sound that was playing before the new sound finally loads up and unclogs the system. Could the soundcard have something to do with it?
But the most important question is, what would cause a quad-core processor to just completely stop working if it's not overheating?
Full specs:
Win 7 64-bit
4 GB RAM
AMD Athlon II X4 640, 4 cores, 3GHz
nVidia GeForce GTX 560
