Our Frigidaire side-by-side stopped cooling one day, then after a couple of days came back to life by itself. It worked fine for about two weeks, then it stopped cooling again. But it's not totally dead – the interior temperature in the freezer and fridge is about 60 degrees. The fan is running – I can hear it and it blows cold air out the bottom grille. One time I heard the compressor come on for a few seconds, then it went silent.

I opened up the back panel to see if I could figure out whether the compressor was dead or if the problem was something else (I'm new at this). The condenser fan is running. The compressor felt warm. I put a multimeter's probes across the two horizontal terminals on the compressor and got widely fluctuating readings for the resistance. The readings would keep changing rapidly while I was holding the probes on the terminals. Same thing happened with tests on any two pairs of terminals. Don't know what to make of this. I managed to pull out the run capacitor and tested it and got a steady "1" on the multimeter.

When I put everything back together and plugged it in, the compressor came on, but only for a few seconds.

Any thoughts on what could be wrong with the fridge?