Help, my computer keeps freezing

[glan120]

Recently my computer has started freezing a lot. I built the computer myself and have had it for a few years now.
It has 2X4 GB of ram, 2.66GHz quad core i5 processor, NVIDIA geforce GTS 250, 130 GB free of 323 GB total, and a 750W psu.
When the computer freezes, the screen locks in the position it was in and nothing can be changed. Ctrl alt del doesn't work and pressing the caps lock key doesn't cause the corresponding light on my keyboard to glow. Sometimes sound will continue for a bit while the computer is frozen but that's it. There is no blue screen. When this happens I do a hard reset via hardware and when my computer reboots, it works fine until the next time it happens. It tends to freeze when I am video chatting someone and playing video games at the same time, though not exclusively. I'm thinking it could be ram issues, though I'd expect a blue screen, my cpu overheating, though I expect that my computer would reset itself, not freeze, or power issues. I friend suggested that the fans could be dirty. The inside of my tower does look rather dusty, so I'll clean it out and see if that helps.
Has anyone else experienced this? What suggestions do you have?

[Jplus]

Sorry I don't have an answer to your question, just wanted to say that from the topic title, at first I thought you needed help with freezing your computer.

[glan120]

Lol, didn't see that coming, it probably grabbed some poeple's attention though

[PhoenixEnigma]

You could start by checking Event Viewer after a freeze, but if it's not even giving you a BSOD, there's a decent chance nothing is getting written there. Win+R -> eventvwr.msc will launch that, if you want to take a look (Critical and Error events are the ones to keep an eye out for). Still, it takes all of a few seconds, so it's worth looking.

My best guess based on what you've said would be the CPU overheating enough to be unstable, but not catastrophically-failingly so, but it's easier to do some stress testing than hope some random person on some fora is right.

Start by clearing all that dust out. Pay particular attention to any heatsinks with fans - you might want to get some compressed air, hold the fan still, and blow the dust out of those.

Grab Intel Burn Test, set the stress level to Maximum, and Times to run to 10. It'll probably take an hour or so to run, unless it finds an error. If it passes, your CPU is almost certainly okay and you can move on to testing other things. If not, you'll need to sort that out, and that bridge can be crossed when you get to it.

If the CPU checks out okay, RAM would be the next thing to check. Download HCI MemTest and launch four copies (one per core, basically). Set each to test 1/4 your available RAM (which will probably end up being just a touch under 2GB per instance), hit "Start Testing" on each, and let them run until they all report several hundred percent coverage. Again, this will take some time. If your RAM is okay, you shouldn't see any errors, otherwise you'll probably want to replace it.

Those are the two most likely culprits and are easy enough to test in a hands-off fashion, so start with that and hope that pins things down.

[glan120]

Thanks for the response!
I'll get to it right away

[GeorgeH]

PE made some good suggestions, but I'd bet that it's either your HDD (small chance) or a software issue (large chance.) If it were my machine I'd format the HDD and reinstall the OS, then run the PC with minimal software for awhile to see if the problem persists - tracking down little problems like this can simply take way too much time if you haven't got a better idea of what's going on.