Dead Freeze

M

Marcus

New Member
I have a problem and am wondering if anybody else has this problem or knows how to fix it.

Whenever I put a disc in my computer the computer will begin to load it, it makes all the usual noises, but then it will go into a complete dead freeze on the current screen. It doesn't matter if the disc is a game or a program or a movie or music or cd or dvd, they all freeze.

I have an acer computer with Windows XP, 1 GB of ram, a Radeon 9600 Graphics Card. In the last few years I have also put a new hard drive in and replaced the CD drive with a DVD drive.

Thankyou for reading
Marcus
 
Bad ram or a video issue like a need to update the driver set would be the first things to look at. A free Linux tool known as memtest would be the first item to run a series of stress tests on the current memory installed to see a dimm has developed any faults.

Another thing a bit more minor in nature is the common need to replace the battery on the board itself being an older system. If that is now weak you can expect a few odd problems to come up since the cmos information stored in the bios setup program is maintained by the battery on the board itself.

Those are usually 2032 number lithium type batteries typically found in battery racks in retail stores where calculators or watches are sold. Take the battery along to match the actual number up correctly however.

The memtest tool is free at two different sites one even for a bootable cd at http://www.memtest86.com/ and also seen at http://www.memtest.org/
 
Another thing a bit more minor in nature is the common need to replace the battery on the board itself...
Click to expand...

Sorry, which board do you mean? (I don't know much about computers)
 
Marcus said:
Sorry, which board do you mean? (I don't know much about computers)
Click to expand...

He means the motherboard. (Right? :P) The big board that everything is connected to someway or another. I'd also check that the cables connecting your drive to your motherboard are snug.
 
That's correct! That would be the main system board. The battery itself is a small silver colored coin sized item seen in usually a black plastic holder.

The user manual will show what battery number is used as well as or should have? a diagram of the board itself. Often you have to move a jumper found on two small pins over to a third from pins #1, #2 to #2, #3 and then back to the #1, #2 when the battery is taken out for about 30 seconds. That will see the cmos cleared where time and date will have to be re-entered once the system is started again as well as when simply replacing the battery.
 
When first coming across problems like these, I'd just do a spyware/virus scan and clean my computer up a little, CCleaner is a good, safe tool for doing that. If all this fails, I'd probably suspect a bad installations; hardware failure would be the last thing I'd look at.
 
So when you insert an optical disk it locks up? Have you tried going to a single drive (you have two, right?) Can you boot to a disk or is it just when you're in Windows?
 
Internal batteries only back up data for the BIOS settings, and would not affect how a CD auto runs, the OS would control that.

You need to not assume its something but rather go through process of elimination.

First of all, can you reproduce the problem with a different CD? If no, and all other CDs work, then the problem is most likely your disk. If yes it reproduces in the OS from any CD, then the problem can be something else.

See if you can boot off a CD, and if you can then the device itself is working and it could be OS related. If you can't boot from a CD, check the BIOS settings and make sure it is set to boot from it and recognized in the BIOS itself.

If the CD does in fact boot from CD then you can look at other things like OS, user account, or other hardware related problems.

Since you do not know what it is, you need to start deducting what it isn't and then narrow it down. This is a very standard process in trouble shooting called the process of elimination.
 
If it turns out to be Windows related as suspected a simple trip into the device manager to right click on the optical drive listing under DVD/CD drives choosing the uninstall option in the right click menu and system restart will see Windows perform a fresh redetection of the drive.

The other option before that however would be to select the update driver option as well as using a lens cleaner if all disks are in good shape being scratch and finger mark free. Does the data cable simply need to be replaced since the old drive was? That would also be another thought if the cable is the grey flat ribbon type and now bad.
 
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