Woke up this morning and my screen was black (from being idle overnight) and found out my computer froze. Couldn't get the monitor to show anything so I decided to restart it. It gets stuck at random points after it boots up =/. It froze once right after the windows booting screen and everything was black. So I tried to restart one more time and it froze after the screen loads this time, I could see my mouse and everything but then it was just stuck in the middle of the screen. So after the third try, it manages to start up and I'm thinking its my HD dieing? bad power supply or wut? Virus?! (Anyway I'm defragmenting my HD to see maybe if it'll help since I haven't in such a long time... atm it's running fine)

EDIT: Oh btw my HD is like 200gigs and it's pretty new and I've only used up like 15 gigs... thats including FF... so 92% available free space! (all I use my desktop for is FF and Word)

If I had to guess I'd say your video card is acting up, especially if you're logged on for days at a time. Most likely, since it seemed to fix itself from what you're saying, you just overheated and your comp needed to rest for awhile; however, if you start frequently freezing up on ffxi tho, it's probably something screwy with your HD and if that's the case then I'd recommend replacing it asap or at least storing all your important docs on a different HD and such. I had a faulty HD on a dell a year or so ago and it constantly froze on ffxi [either the HD or a power supply, I replaced almost everything else in that shitty comp]; after a year it just completely crashed (comp won't even boot) and I lost everything that I hadn't yet stored somewhere else.

That's my 2 cents though; I could be completely wrong :3

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Do you hear any clicking noises when the hard drive spins up?

Have you tried booting into safe mode?

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I hear pushing a sock in the Floppy Disk drive during a quarter moon sometime in a leap year, whilst balancing three Haddocks on your left hip and milking a cow sorts all kind of problems with computers.

And what luck you have - This year is a leap year!

How's your milking skills?

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Still puzzled how so many people think that defragmenting could fix ANYTHING.

It certainly DOES NOT.

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looooooooool defrag. wut a joke.

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but it changes red to blue!! RED TO BLUE!!! > !!!!

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Reason #2394 that pc's suck. GL with finding out what is going on, sounds like video card though like people said. If it was your HDD you wouldn't be able to boot windows at all. Trust me, I know this, I been through a lot on PC and hated every second. Which is kinda why I'm a vegetarian now.

Apparently not enough experience. You should try out this 300GB Maxtor I have here. Windows will boot fine. But it will stop working (freeze) after a random amount of time with no indication of any reasons. Yes, it was the HDD. One of the heads was unbalanced and randomly stopped being in sync with the others.

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Check and see if your fans on both your video cards and CPU are still spinning and that they have not come loose.

The reason my Graphics card keeps failing occasionally is because dust builds up on the internal fans. Thus, I take my computer down to the garage, and blast the shit out of it with my Grandfather's Air Compressor

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I had that same problem, but I narrowed it down to the power supply starting to fail, and the motherboard going bad. That certainly was a bitch to fix.

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I also had a power supply problem. Would randomly cut off my pc. I just unhooked some stuff and it worked again. Maybe I went over my power cap with all the usb crap I had connected. Hate hate hate PCs. They should release FFXI on psp already gawd (can't reformat ps3 for ffxi. I got too many games on it from other people).

there is a chance the problem could be with your fan and or graphic's card fan.

my old comp used to randomly freeze up when i either left it on for too long or if i was in a room that's too warm. a few quick sprays of compressed oxigen to clean up the fans really helped it out. it still freezes every now and then, but that's caus the fan really is just dead.