Dell Freeze

[NickCat11]

I have a Dell Windows XP machine here that instantly freezes on the splash screen once it appears. Here is what I've done.

1. Swapped the RAM
2. Slaved drive and checked for viruses and ran chkdsk....no errors
3. Tried booting from a live cd....freezes during splash screen as well.
4. Safe mode does not work
5. Reapplied thermal paste to heatsink...same problem
6. Swapped ide hard drive with another one from another machine (same problem)

Any suggestions?

 

[NYJimbo]

Swap the video card or put in a generic SVGA card and boot with a live cd to see if it gets past the freeze.

 

[NickCat11]

No luck with the video card swap...same issue.

 

[MobileTechie]

What happens with a non Windows boot CD?

I'm thinking that if this works then you know it's Windows rather than h/w and get some more info -
If you can get in with a linux one then you could use the /sos switch in boot.ini to turn off the splash screen and see the drivers being loaded
Also then if you'd enabled boot logging you could read the log

 

[NickCat11]

What happens with a non Windows boot CD?

I get random numbered errors with all of the non-windows boot cds. The errors show up instantly...

 

[studiot]

instantly freezes on the splash screen once it appears

Do you mean the Dell screen or the Windows XP one?

and what happens with the bios?

 

[pc-wiz]

Could be processor or mobo??????

 

[JD1248]

Sounds like processor to me. Have you tried to run PC check. Can you swap out processor w/known good?

 

[iisjman07]

Check the USB sockets, check they have nothing in them (I've seen this do what you described) and check they are not broken and touching any metal

 

[NickCat11]

It freezes during the XP Splash screen, sorry for not being clear there. I'll check the usb sockets, maybe I'll get lucky there. I don't have a extra processor so that's out. I'll post back the results. Thanks guys.

 

[NickCat11]

No luck with the usb sockets. I swapped the power supply for the heck of it and no joy there either. I called the customer up and explained to them the situation. They replied that they didn't want to put more than $100 into it so that's it for me. I'm calling it a day on this one. I'm just going to assume it was probably the mobo.

 

[studiot]

You didn't answer the question about the bios.

Why not a corrupt bios that needs reflashing?

 

[Skyhooker]

When you say you swapped the RAM, have you tried using only one slot at a time? I worked on one a couple months ago that had a damaged memory slot caused by an extremely bad case design, and when I removed the memory card from that slot it worked flawlessly.

 

[NickCat11]

You didn't answer the question about the bios.

Why not a corrupt bios that needs reflashing?

Sorry, I forgot to mention in my previous post that I did flash the BIOS. The issue still remained.

I did try one slot at a time with the RAM, no luck.

 

[chrisaroz]

Did you run the Dell Diagnostics?

 

[atlanticjim]

CPU probably
MOBO possibly
Definitely toast and not worth spending another minute on.