Re-Occurring System Crashes

Hello all,

A few days ago, my computer started to freeze after login;not sure why. Either it will freeze, not respond to input, then reboot and do that a couple times. Or, it appears that explorer crashes, then becomes non-responsive, resulting in mandatory hard boot. I've tested the hard drive, Hard Disk Sentinel displays hdd health is at 100%. CPU temps is not a problem because it never goes above 56C. I'm not sure if the graphics card is the problem but my screen does freeze if I bump the case. Any amount of help would be greatly appreciated; I plan on building a replacement but until then this Heap-O-Crap will have to do. Thanks.

specs:

AMD Athlon ii X2 250@ 3.00 GHz

4GB DDR3 ram@ 1033 MHz

geforce 8600gts

500GB 5400RPM drive

Antec 430W psu(80+ Bronze)

Windows 8 Pro 64-bit

Hey Chief

Im assuming you did safe boot, update drivers etc

Have you tried your HDD in another machine? At least then you can recover any data you may lose.

Usually with windows these sort of crashes lead to the Graphics card, have you got an onboard GPU or spare GPU you can use (Must do 1366x 768 for win8).

Bumping the case causing freezing is a connection issue, check all your components are fixed in and cables are attached properly (latches on etc).

Good LuckĀ 

Thank you so much. It turns out that the cause of the freezing was human error. The card must have been sitting badly in the pci-e slot, so I reinstalled it; now works like a charm. The POS lives!!