Random Freezes on a laptop

Any ideas?

[SEOMike]

I've got a laptop that randomly freezes. A complete reload of Win XP did not solve the problem. If I leave windows task manager up while it sits, it stays running. But, when installing big software, or just plain surfing, it will freeze and stay frozen. The powersave options are all turned off (screensaver, HDD shutdown, etc) Think this is a driver problem? Maybe a bad vid card? SOMEthing is wrong. It did this with an install of Win2k and now does it with XP. Any ideas would be much appreciated.

[moishe]

Howdy Mike,

One thing you might try is installing 98, this will at least help you determine if it is a hardware problem or a software/driver issue. Chances are, if it still locks up in 98, you have a hardware problem.

Have you tried:

Updating the bios?
Updating the firmware for any PCMCIA cards/CD roms etc?
If you have multiple sticks of ram/ pull 1 then swap?
Run full scandisk on HD from prompt to see if it is developing bad sectors and thus maybe crashing?

Good luck

[msgraph]

Could be a heat issue.

Does any section of the keyboard feel warmer than other areas before it freezes up? On one laptop I had, every time I would run a bunch of applications, the right side of the keyboard would get unusually warm. The system would lock up randomly, then one day it wouldn't start at all.

[SEOMike]

Does any section of the keyboard feel warmer than other areas before it freezes up?

Yes it does! That's a good point! I should have thought of that after posting in this thred [webmasterworld.com] a couple of times today! I wonder the battery is getting hot because it's bad. It only lasts about 10 minutes. Maybe that's what's heating up the machine. I'll give it a shot w/o the battery in tonight. We'll see if it locks up. Maybe shopping for a replacement fan would help too.

[jim_w]

Make sure the vents are open and clear. Vents on a laptop can be hard to spot. Especially spotting all of them. There is no reason for the battery to get hot unless you have a short somewhere. More than likely, some voltage regulator is getting hot and they have internal circuits in them to shut them down when they reach a certain threshold.

>>If I leave windows task manager up while it sits, it stays running.

This seems strange. Try turning the ‘num-lock’ on and off via the keyboard. Sometimes the computer freezes, but you can still turn on and off the ‘num-lock’. This means that the BIOS is still working and the OS is the problem. If the ‘num-lock’ does not work, then there may be a hardware problem.

But there are many, many other reason why it could happen.