What to blame on these lockups?

[Tygur]

My system has been locking up once in a while, usually only if I get up and leave it for several hours. But it can do it while I'm still siting there, though it's rare.

Basically, the entire system would freeze. I wouldn't even be able to move the mouse. And the hard drive light would just be on. Not blinking. Not off. Just on, like the power led. Once I press the reset button, it just restarts just fine, like nothing happened.

The most recent hardware changes were a new processor (Athlon XP Thoroughbred 2600+) and a new hard drive (120GB Seagate). Windows XP was also recently reinstalled.

So..any ideas on what I should be blaming?

[watchtower7]

was the reinstall clean?

[Tygur]

yep
I had to do it because I lacked the tools to reliably copy it between hard drives.

[watchtower7]

all windows critical updates?

You should run Sea Tools on the HDD.

[watchtower7]

Evil Rick I will bet you it is a power option problem/not a hd problem.

[Tygur]

Originally posted by watchtower7
all windows critical updates?

That was one of the first things I did after installing.

Originally posted by watchtower7
Evil Rick I will bet you it is a power option problem/not a hd problem.

Are you referring to the Power Options, available from the control panel? After I started noticing this, I had set it to never turn off the hard disks, and never to go into standby or hibernate. When I realized that wasn't helping anything, I set it to hibernate after an hour, just so that if I do get up and walk away, I won't come back to a locked-up computer.

[watchtower7]

sounds fixed to me

[Tygur]

Originally posted by watchtower7
sounds fixed to me

It's not fixed yet, though. Now it can pretty much only come while I'm still at the computer. It's still not happening very often, but when it does, I'm just more likely to be sitting there. I thought it was pretty much fixed, too, until it locked up on me today right after it came out of hibernation. That's why I started this thread.

[watchtower7]

do you have systemworks or some kind of windows error check program?
and/or system registry repair tools/
I'd run those.
After that, evil rick will have to fix it.