[MC84]

I figure this forum is as good a place to ask as anywhere else - basically my Mum's PC (which I set up for her) is freezing up randomly.. It's running windows 10 home, intel i3, B460 Motherboard... It's one of those 'bare bones' systems for people who just want to use office and browse the internet etc. The freezes are pretty random, and my Mum only uses google chrome and sometimes MS office. I was convinced that it was a software issue causing the freezes (despite almost no apps installed on the system) so I formatted the hard drive and re-installed windows. However the freezes are still occurring. Now I'm not sure if it's because my Mum isn't shutting down properly when it freezes (or using CTRL+ALT+DEL) but usually she'll then get a 'disk boot error' message from BIOS when she tries turning the PC back on.

As far as I'm concerned it's a minor annoyance, but my Mum being old is now wanting to go out and buy a new PC/laptop because she's convinced she's got a 'lemon'... the system is only 1 year old and has barely been used (apart from email/browsing/MS office)... I realize it's almost impossible to diagnose an issue with someone else's PC on the other side of the world, but does this seem like a software or hardware issue? I'm now thinking maybe the motherboard and/or hard drive is faulty and I should try replacing that, rather than have her go out and waste money on a new machine. But I'm taking a stab in the dark here - the PC is at my Mum's house and I've caught it in the act once (freezing up) but I'm mostly not there when it happens.

[lllllllllllllll]

I'll guess it was Windows 10 hogging 100% of disk and she hard powered it off. It really loves to- without any prompt- run things in the background while you're using it if you don't wipe scheduled tasks and automated defrag or God forbid remove the updater and its 30 self restoring services

[Forge]

Sounds like the hard drive has a bad sector.

try running a drive scan that operates outside of windows

from a cmd prompt:

wmic diskdrive get model,status

and

chkdsk /f
optionally:
chkdsk /f /r /x

[MC84]

Forge, on 15 February 2023 - 07:42 AM, said:

Sounds like the hard drive has a bad sector.

try running a drive scan that operates outside of windows

from a cmd prompt:

wmic diskdrive get model,status

and

chkdsk /f
optionally:
chkdsk /f /r /x

Sorry just saw your reply now - well I thought I'd nailed down the freezes to a missing graphics card driver, but it's still doing random shutdowns.. and then I've found that I have to reset the bios/cmos to get it to boot sometimes... anyway I will give your suggestion a try next time I'm over at her place.