Computer locking up, looking for bootable hardware diagnostic tool.

Posted by Carl Menke on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Carl Menke
Published on 2010-10-23T01:00:11Z Indexed on 2010/12/31 18:55 UTC
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cpu

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motherboard

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lockup

Well today I helped my friend build a computer. All went pretty well until we got to installing Win7. Thing is, we thought, it was crashing constantly. I adjusted pretty much every setting in the BIOS and removed as much hardware as possible to try and prevent a crash. No dice.

So far I've tried running an Ubuntu live cd without the harddrive installed. Nope, crashed on boot. And then I just tried Microsoft's ram utility disk and it eventually locked up on that (the ram passed though).

So it seems to me like it's either the CPU (AMD PhenomII x3) or the motherboard that could be bad, but I don't know how to test them individually for problems. I thought it could be a overheating issue, but the BIOS reports that the CPU temp is fine idling around 34C. Any advice or diagnostic disk that could help me out?

TL;DR: Computer locks up frequently during use (cannot even boot/install an operating system), memory is fine, probably CPU or Mobo, BIOS says CPU temps are fine. What should I try?

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