Finally tonight I solved the annoying and incapacitating freeze-up on my latest home-built PC.
I got an Asus Mobo with nVidia GeForce 6150 and a dual core AMD Athlon 4200+. 2GB Mushkin DDR2 800 memory, and SATA II hard drives in a nice Antec case.
After I got XP MCE on there and some of the Asus drivers the system started locking up anywhere from 20 seconds to 30 minutes after booting up. It made it hard to load diagnostic tools and troubleshoot. No blue screens or beeps - the screen just slowly froze.
I was afraid I had incompatible memory and hard drives (the Maxtor drives are incompatible depending on the firmware level and the memory is not on the tested list). After troubleshooting off and on for a couple of weeks, I finally found that I needed the latest nVidia chipset driver, not the one that comes on the Installation CD for the Asus. There were so many possibilities and I went through many if them. My vendor did not have a clue, and Asus does not have this driver or information on their site! Luckily I found out about this issue from other users with the same motherboard on the Asus site by searching on Google (and they blasted Asus for not getting this information and drivers on their site)!
I hardly know what to do with this hot rod of a PC now that it is so stable! Time to check out Multimedia Center Edition...
