OK, I replaced my Z555 this past week with  a new M9340F. Amazing machine, but I brought my Z555 to work and all of a sudden, out of the blue it crashes completely randomely. It with either just reboot, or hard lock. I have done all kinds of recovery formats and it still does it. As everyone with a Z555 knows, these things run blazingly hot, and I myself have had to replace the HDD 3 times in the last 3 years. Not good. I am wondering if it could be a sign of another impending HDD failure? Sometimes it will run an entire day fine, sometimes it will hard lock a dozen times. I looped Prime 95 to run for 3 hours straight one time and it was fine. I brought it here to sell, so I dont want the thing being brought back 2 days later.

@ stevessvt,

I was going to say CPU or MB failure until I got to the part about running Prime95 for three hours straight.  I'm going to assume that under that workload it had to have gone into "jet mode" for the heat.

I don't know.  HDD failure could be the likely culprit, that would cause those symptoms, but it could be another component as well.  If you have a spare HDD sitting around you could try that and see if it helps.  Beyond that, you'd need to procure replacement parts(CPU, RAM, etc.) to do swap-and-see troubleshooting.

Sorry I can't be more help.

BW

(PS: SVT?  Lightning or Cobra?)

I would download a live cd, like Knoppix or even better, a verson that includes Media features, and boot from that. Run a movie or other CPU intensive tasks and see if it locks then. If it works indefinately, you have your answer. If you run into problems with the Live CD, then it may likely be hardware other than the HD.

HTH

Heybiff

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Hp DEC Z558
XP MCE
Two yrs under the belt, only sent back twice!
New vid card, new DVD drive.