I have an XP machine that when working hard has a long beep (inside the box) and then freezes. I must turn it off and then restart manually. At one point when I restarted, it stated that I had a thermal error on last shutdown. I cleaned out the box, removed and reinserted RAM, the fan is working, but might have stopped for a while. Any thoughts. It seems like it shuts down when working hard, like when I tried to an antivirus disk scan. Any assistance would be very helpful, our whole office is XP and prefer to just fix this right now instead of changing everything over.
It sounds like the macine is overheating, and therefore is forced to shut itself down to prevent further damage. Make sure the processor fan is fitted correctly, and be 100% sure it's working all the time. If not, buy a new fan! You can download SpeedFan (Google it) and check the temperature of various parts of your computer. The CPU will vary depending on make and model, but as a general guide it should be less than 60 degrees celcius when idle, and more ideally it should be about 25-35 degrees celcius when idle, and upto 45 when working hard. Thomas
hi, It could be heat what are your temps? it could also be RAM problems so run Memtest86 to check for memory errors.
Hi. Click START then RUN, and type eventvwr.msc and press enter. In Event Viewer windows that opens, check Application and System logs. You're looking for events in red. Those could lead you possible causes of the problem. Yes, it could be thermal, on the other hand, it could be something else. If it is thermal, you should not see any errors in Event Viewer.
