i have this random freezing problem for a year now. I'm pretty sure it's related to graphics card. Though, hard to pinpoint a description or search for solution.
about ~2 times a week, my Windows Vista would froze. Meaning, the screen freeze and mouse and keyboard have no effect. The only way to get out i know of is holding down the Power key on the PC to force a shutdown. (Ctrl+Alt+Delete does not help)
When this happens, there's a random goggling sound for about 1 second.
The freezing happens usually when i'm in Second Life (which is a 3D game), but not always.
There's a very high chance of freezing when Windows just woke up from sleep, or the PC just powered on from power off. (so, everytime i restart my computer due to freezing, there's a high chance that it'll freeze again immediately, sometimes before the Windows login screen shows up. More rarely, the LCD won't even show. When this happens, i force poweroff, unplug the power and wait for 30 seconds, then power on the pc again. Always worked.)
This freezing happens ever since i bought my PC last year.
I'm pretty sure it's not a gpu temperature problem, because i've install nvidia's system monitor. Also, i don't think it is a cpu ram problem, because i used Windows Memory Diagnostic to check and it didn't report problem. I'm a unix sys admin and web app programer. I don't know much about hardware.
my graphics card is: “BFG Tech NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT 512 MB”
my graphics card driver has always up-to-date from nvidia. Right now it is version 257.21 (8.17.12.5721).
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition, 64-bit Service Pack 2, Build 6002 DirectX 10.0 (6.0.6000.16386) AMD Phenom(tm) 9650 Quad-Core Processor my PC is: Link