Comp freezes and internal speakers start making weird noises

[fanatical-ace]

This has happended 3 times now, twice in daoc and once in swg.

In daoc the game didnt crash/freeze but it did in swg - the internal speaker in the pc started sounding like a warning siren (like a firetruck etc), the second time it happend in daoc it passed after about 30 sec and nothing more happened (at least not visibly), the first time it happend i shut the system down manually (i cut power) and when i rebooted the system acted very odd, wouldnt let me start any program at all or even open any folders =/
Turned out my firewall was eating 100% system resources and wouldnt stop doing this despite several reboots - i reinstalled the firewall thinking it had somehow been corrupted. The firewall issue hasnt turned up again but now (third time the speaker start making this sound) i was playing swg and the system frooze up. Nothing more happened after i rebooted however. Still i find this very strange.
Could i have some virus thats causing this or have i been hacked somehow? Ive been hacked before, and have had servers running on my system without my knowledge but have upgraded my security since then.
Was thinking it might be some warning mechanism (if overheated etc?) of the gfx card i run, a Powercolor radeon 9800pro 128mb but havent found any such thing in the manual or on the net.

Anyone have any ideas/suggestions as to what might cause this?

 

[chretien]

Usually the internal speaker only makes a noise when it starts up to give you the POST beep (Power On Self Test that tells youalls well and the machine can boot). If you get multple beeps then that indicates a problem at a fairly basic level - i.e. with hardware rather than with Windows. Depending on what BIOS you have will depend on what beeps you'll get and what those peeb codes mean.

When you start your computer up right before anything else you'll get a black screen with the amount of memory in the system and a table where it tries to detect the drives in the system. At the top of this screen it'll say what kind of BIOS you have, there are only three major ones - Phoenix, Award and AMI. Tell us what kind of BIOS you have and if possible try and count the number and pattern of beeps you get from the internal speaker when it goes off.

 

[fanatical-ace]

Thanks for the answer

Thing is when i boot my comp i dont get to see what you describe, all i get is a log of QDI (the manufacturer of the motherboard) and after that the text in the startup sequence flashes by so fast that i dont get to see the begining of it. So i am unsure as to what BIOS i have - maybe my motherboard tells you something of this tho? A QDI platinix board.

As to the sound, well its a pattern of 2 sounds short,long,short, long and so on. It goes on for about 30sec i think BeepBepBeepBepBeepBep etc etc.

Hope that tells you something =/

EDIT: I am stupid. I just entered the BIOS and checked: its an Award BIOS.

 

[chretien]

well this link says that the beep code indicates either an incorrectly seated CPU or one that's overheating. I'd go with the overheating myself especially as you were getting freeze ups in SWG.
There'll be a temperature gauge in the BIOS more than likely but it should only be taken as a rough guide as many things can make them unreliable or useless. Check that and then if you're reasonably technical check the heatsing and fan on your CPU, make sure its seated properly, if possible take it out and have a look at the surface see if there's any evidence of damage (the top of the chip burning an image of itself onto the metal plate is usually a dead giveaway). before you put it back on make sure there's some thermal compound on the bottom and it's not just on the chip 'dry'.
Also try running it with the side off and check the fan on the heatsink is actually spinning.

 

[fanatical-ace]

Thanks, ill check again but according to the BIOS readings the temperature is a good 10-15 degrees from warning temp (its running at about 50-56 degrees celcius and i have the warning set to 66 and shutdown to 70). As you say it might be showing the wrong numbers but since it didnt shutdown/freeze on 2 of 3 occassions im a bit confused. Also the comp is over a year old and it was over a month since i made any hardware changes/upgrades (new gfx) and this problem manifested only a couple of days ago.

Sigh... computers...

 

[chretien]

Temperature gauges can be unreliable for a number of reasons. It depends on the placing of the probes and how good a thermal connection they have to the cpu, the probes themselves can vary in sensitivity and quality and finally airflow can cool the probes while the rest of the PC gets very hot. I never take them as more than a very rough guide and if I'm faced with what looks like an overheating problem and the probes say everythings fine, I'll ignore them.

 

[cjkaceBM]

1 - Sounds like overheating as has been said above. Check that your fan is spinning at a decent speed (bearings wear out), that the cooler is seated properly and if your heatsink paste has shrunk creating hotspots.

2 - QDI motherboards have a boot up screen built into the BIOS. You can switch it off in the BIOS, look for an option stating boot-up image/screen or you can simply press the tab key to see the POST screen.

Alternatively you can check their website to see if your motherboard has a bios that supports loading your own boot up screen.

http://www.qdigrp.com