Help with random hard lockups

[Varroa]

You talking to me or the thread capper? I haven't had the overclock on mine in a while and I have excellent cooling in my rig.

I was responding to your initial post.

[Varroa]

Looks like my random lockups are still here. I can eliminate windows (did a fresh install and I am still getting them). I am working on the hardware now, so far I have ran memtest for 1 hour with no errors, switched CPUs and right now I am running with all expansion cards removed. Next I will try switching the powersupply. If all that fails then I guess it may be the motherboard.

or the hard drives... or it could also be the sata port. I've had sata ports fail on me in the past.. in fact I almost threw out a perfectly good 500gb drive.

[Varroa]

Notice that the network card was moving in the slot when I pulled it out. I also had one instance of my network card disappearing. Been running for 6 hours with no lockups with all cards removed (except video card and using onboard network). I ran Orthos for 2 hours, prime95 for one and had a bittorent downloading and ran a Blueray all at the same time. So far it seems good. I will wait till tomorrow until I start putting back in my cards just to make sure. Going to add new card each day over the week until I find the card that was acting up or until I get them all back in.

First thing will be to re-add my quad and OCZ vendetta. This Pentium dual core E2200 that I am using is pretty slow.

[Varroa]

Pulling the cards has fixed the problem from the looks of it. No lockups in days now. I have put back in my sound card with no problems. Tonight I am going to put back in the 9600GSO physX card and my TV tuner. If that is stable the last thing will be the network card.

[Waldie]

Glad to hear things are working out for you Varroa. To report back on my own problems, I wiped my drive and did a clean install of Windows 7 and that cleared up my problem. Glad it was so simple. A little annoying trying to remember all the programs I need to re-install, I should have gone through my programs and made a list of what would need to be reinstalled first. Ah well, just glad my computer's back to top form.

[Varroa]

Well, the problem is finally figured out. My mobo is dieing. Everytime I try and put any card in any of the PCI-e x1 slots I get hard lockups. New motherboard on it's way.

[Waldie]

Not happy. My computer just now decided to do the lockups again. It's been a week since I reinstalled Windows 7, and it was running with absolutely no problems whatsoever, very speedy. Now it's doing it again, I've had three lockups in the past five minutes, the third of which occurred as I was typing this. And now a fourth. Resource monitor show half the spikes are from 'System', and the other half are from 'System Interrupts'. Aside from these spikes, the CPU is sitting at about 5%. They are happening as I'm typing, or as I'm moving the mouse, nothing strenuous, and the only thing running in the background is the performance monitor that I opened as soon as they started happening about ten minutes ago.

I don't understand... it must be a hardware issue, right? I mean, I completely wiped my hard drive, deleted all the partitions and did a fresh install of Windows 7, and it's still happening again now. But the computer was completely fine for a week afterwards. It's very confusing. I don't really know what else to do. I'll try opening it up and taking memory modules out and the video card and clean things up a little with some compressed air dusting, then replace them. If anyone has any idea what's going on or at least knows where I should next take my trouble-shooting then it would be greatly appreciated if you would share your wisdom.

[Waldie]

Ok, so after last time I posted, I took out my video card and memory, since they are the easiest things to take out, dust off and put back in. After that, I didn't have the freezes for over three weeks, until just in the past hour. These freezes are ridiculous, as far as I can tell, there's no reason for them. I first thought it was a software issue, so I did a clean install of Windows 7. Then it was fine for a week. Then it started doing it again, so I took out and put back in my video card and memory, and it was fine for three weeks, now it's back. It's causing my CPU usage to sometimes go up to hundreds of percent usage, which I did not even realize was possible (obviously shouldn't be). I included a couple images below, included one from while I was writing this post (sorry if it's too small to make things out well, I had to resize from 1920 to 1024 pixels to meet image hosting requirements.