first, some specs

XP Home
Desktop
HP a250y
ps2 mouse n keyboard

internal
1gb RAM(2x512)
CD-R/RW drive
DVD drive
120g master HDD
250g slave HDD
P4 HT 2.6 Ghz
geforce fx 5600
creative soundblaster audigy

external (they aren't hooked right now)
DVD-R/RW drive
160g HDD
500g HDD


My PC freezes at odd points during startup. Sometimes it'll freeze at the BIOS screen, other times during the Windows loading screen, and if I even get past that, the mouse pointer, along with everything will just freeze in windows...

I always keep my PC as clean as I can... at startup I only have about 24 processes running...

I have not installed any new hardware recently.

I used to have blue screens of death until I reformatted recently.. after the reformat blue screens pop up after the windows loading screen sometimes, then a black menu shows up asking if I want to

• start in safe mode

• last known good configuration

• start windows normally

I went into BIOS and loaded the defaults. my PC froze 5 mins into startup (it started up to windows fine, but it froze)

I burned a memtest86 (to test the RAM) bootable cd and ran it... it froze 22 min into the scan/test!!

its prob about to freeze again

Hi there and welcome to PCGF, can you access your PC's Bios and tell me whether all boot devices are showing up ok? E.g. Hard Drive, DVD Rom etc.

yes, they are all there

something's loose from my motherboard!!! some square metal thing... I'll get pics asap

Hi welcome to the forum Sounds like a memory related problem to me try removing 1 ram stick and booting if you have the same result swap them and try and boot. Is the result still the same?

pics

Oh No your heat sink has come looses this no good and will most likely be the cause of your problems. The picture you have posted see the hook there is 2 of the you clip the wire through to attache it to your mainboard you will need to get some thermal grease for a electronics store or PC shop and remove the heat sink and clean it of all old grease and wipe it off the chip and reapply new grease and reattache the heat sink. This is not hard to do but if your unconfident on doing it your self maybe best to take it to a PC shop. But it is easy to do