[SOLVED] Computer freezes and then beeps.. help!

[blustardave]

I have an old Alienware Area 51 PC that was a hand-me-down from my dad and I've been having some problems with it for a while, but they've been getting much worse as of recently.

The first problem I can remember is a few months ago when playing games the computer would occasionally suddenly slow completely down and all sound would become very distorted and, for lack of a better word, robotlike. To fix it, I would have to hold the power button down to completely turn the PC off then boot it back up. However, this issue seemed to just stop one day and the computer ran alright until a few weeks ago.

Now occasionally when I turn the PC on, it beeps from the inside 6 times repeatedly, pausing after the 6th beep. Normally, this is remedied by holding the power button down to turn it off, and then turning it back on, but sometimes it keeps beeping on the next boot up. I found that turning it off, unplugging everything apart from the power cord, turning it back on and then plugging everything back in worked as a temporary fix.

However recently, its been often randomly completely freezing when using it (not even in a demanding way ie. it freezes when just browsing the internet or file explorer) and when I completely turn it off with the power button it does the 6 beeps thing when I boot it back up and I have to unplug everything to get it to work again.

Does anyone have any suggestions of whats going wrong or what I can do to remedy this?

 

[hang-the-9]

You can look up the beep code on Alienware's (Dell now) support site. For an older PC could be anything from power supply, bad motherboard, RAM, really a lot of things. Need to start swapping parts to see what helps or replace it.