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My current desktop has been running very well for the past 3 years. However, in the last month, it has been acting strangely. The system freezes (including the cursor and audio) for apparently no reason and a hard reset is the only option.

I have run stress tests on the CPU (Intel C2D E8400) and GPU (ATI Radeon 5850), run Memtest86+ on the RAM (Corsair DDR 2), and WD Diagnostics on my hard drive (WD Caviar Blue 640 GB), but have seen no errors in any of them.

The freeze occurs during normal browsing (Firefox 7.0 beta, Chrome 15), with no heavy activity going on. The last three times it occurred was when accessing Chase.com, Logtech.com and watching a movie on Netflix.com

Any suggestions on what I should be looking for, diagnostic tools I could use etc. Thanks to all you gerbils in advance.

Note - I used to (rarely) get a temporary screen freeze. That was caused by a display driver crash and Windows would recover and notify so.

Try a stable browser,i am on chrome version 13.something,or even internet explorer 9and see if it stops.Also get the latest drivers for your video card and then Remove the adobe flash player,then reinstall the latest version 10.3 mabey.
Chrome has the flash player integrated,Just make sure its a stable build.
Anyways Imm probably wrong but you say its only browsing,well thats where i would start.
While your at it get windows 7 i hate vista,it runs so dang slow on slow equipment.My mothers2-3yr old laptop a dual core pentium 2.0ghz with vista was slow from day 1,well installed windows 7 on it and what a difference it feels 50% faster.My 2 little dell hd zinos with 1.5ghz amdX2s hum along fine one has the 780g onboard graphics,that one will play all 720p stuff and some 1080p,the one with the hd4330 discrete card will play almost anything @ 1080p,even youtube 1080p but it does drop a few frames but its smooth for the most part.I use the latest chrome stable build.

vargis14 wrote:

While your at it get windows 7 i hate vista,it runs so dang slow on slow equipment.My mothers2-3yr old laptop a dual core pentium 2.0ghz with vista was slow from day 1,well installed windows 7 on it and what a difference it feels 50% faster.

^ this ^

It's as simple as that. Back up your crap. Format. Install Windows 7. Vista was an Operating System FAILURE. Period. There's no fix for failures.

While that's the popular and trendy thing to say, if some piece of hardware is failing it's a waste of money.

That said, it looks like you've done a pretty thorough hardware check. You don't happen to have a spare PSU to swap in do you?

_{(Sorry for the late response)}
Thanks for your comments, vargis14, thegleek, derFunkenstein.

vargis14 wrote:

While your at it get windows 7 i hate vista,it runs so dang slow on slow equipment.

Windows 7 is an option, but like derFunkenstein mentioned, just want to make sure it is not some hardware component that has been acting up in the past few weeks. Besides, my computer has been running Vista just fine otherwise.

derFunkenstein wrote:

You don't happen to have a spare PSU to swap in do you?

I thought CPU and GPU stress tools should help pick up problems in the PSU too. If that is not a good measure, is there some other tool that can help?

I can try going back to stable builds of my browsers, and see if there is still a problem.

All other suggestions are welcome.

Just wanted to post an update to this thread - for the past few weeks I don't seem to have this problem. I stopped running Firefox 7 beta then, and switched to Chrome (using Firefox now after 7 was out of beta).

At the end, I don't know what really caused this problem - something between Firefox beta and my GPU or something wrong in my PSU. Anyway, now I've planned to add a PSU to my upgrade list.

Didn't intend to necro, but wanted to post an update for anyone who might have been curious / arrived here through a search engine.

The problem has finally been resolved.

It was not the PSU - I got a new Seasonic modular 520W PSU, and it continued to happen. It was not the RAM either - 8 hr Memtest86+ runs didn't show any errors.

It appears to be my wireless adapter (USB). Yes, even I can't believe that. It struck me because it was happening only when trying to browse. My first post has the common culprit sites (add CapitalOne.com to that list). The wireless adapter was a ZyXEL G-220 v2 which was given to me around 3 yrs back. I now changed that to an ethernet cable connected Linksys WRT54GL router set up as a bridge to my main wireless router. All these sites work on all the browsers on my machine now.

It was a frustrating experience that ran for a little more than 3 months. Firefox would freeze almost every day, though switching it to Chrome made it slightly bearable (would freeze on a weekly basis). I still don't know how Firefox beta was more susceptible to this, but am curious.

Thanks to all the gerbils who tried to help. My fault that I didn't mention how the system was connected to the internet.

Weird stuff like that can get you. Last week I was looking at a system that wouldn't get past the POST screen - turned out once I unplugged the USB scanner attached to it, it booted up without issue. I was able to reconnect the scanner okay once it booted up, but it didn't actually work again until I power cycled it.

Moral of the story, disconnecting any miscellaneous devices is still a key troubleshooting step!