I’m at a loss here, and I’m looking for some help to buy some time so I can use my laptop this afternoon..
Dell Vostro 1000 w/ Windows XP Home, 2GB Ram, SP2 was 23% free space, now ~ 65% free.
A couple of days ago my laptop started acting quirky — when trying to right-click files to copy, the folder / file would freeze, and then I would have to kill the process or kill explorer.exe to unlock it.
Yesterday, I tried booting up and the system would freeze solid, except my mouse, and if I clicked on things a few times, a loud system beep — all within about a minute of booting up. I played with things for about 7 hours yesterday, finally was able to do a system restore, then deleted all the apps I installed within the last week, ran several virus / spyware scans, cleaned up my registry, etc.
I also ran chkdsk and there weren’t any errors.
Now, I am a bit more stable, but it intermittently freezes up still. Additionally, when I open Firefox, it eats up about 1GB of memory within 10 seconds. I can get firefox to operate normally by completely removing it, then re-installing it, but after starting it a couple of times, it does it again.
I don’t think this is a Firefox problem, though, and I don’t think it’s a virus or bug, at least that I can see through log files, running processes, or through several different spyware / virus detection tools.
If anybody has a clue what might be causing this, and maybe a temporary fix to make the system more stable for a day or so, that help would be appreciated. I won’t suffer much / any data loss as I’m backing things up real-time as I use them now, but it’ll take me over a day to setup my PC, and I have to get work done today.
One more note: I am an exceptionally heavy computer user — sometimes the laptop is online for days at a time, and I actively use it 10+ hours most days. I usually have to format & reinstall the OS 2x a year (I treat my PC kind of like an aggressive pizza delivery-driver treats his/her vehicle), so it’s probably just due to use and abuse, but I’ve never run into these symptoms before, and maybe there’s a likely problem that I can fix temporarily until I have the time to wipe the drive clean and start over.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Laptop freezing can come in a variety of forms. They can be:
• Your computer freezes up completely, leaving you unable to so much as move the mouse around.
• The laptop crashes and restarts, showing the notorious Windows blue screen of death.
• The programs you were using have frozen, you can move the mouse around but it has frozen on the hour glass hand.
There are typically two major causes of laptop freezing problems. The first is running too many programs at once.
The only way to solve this problem is purchase more RAM or simply use less programs at once. Another helpful tip is to cut down on all the excess programs running in the background This can be done by going to Start>>>Run>> and type msconfig. There you can view all the background programs running on your computer.
If the problem is not running too many programs at once, then your computer freezing is related to errors in the Windows registry. The registry contains information to run all software and hardware on your laptop. Unfortunately your system does not have an internal cleaning tool, and as time goes on the registry becomes congested with corrupt files and errors.
These registry errors force a breakdown in the laptops ability to properly communicate information. When the laptop cannot compute, it will freeze up.
To stop laptop freezing you must repair all the errors in your registry.
Have you made provisions for it overheating. Not to oversimplify matters but that is what it sounds like to me especially with heavy usage.
Check out speedfan and see it will help, I use it on every computer I have.
look up computer beeps on google
is ur hard drive spinning
have u looked in ur event look all problems are there and logged
what have u changed in ur programing
what was the last install of any new apps
how many programs run in the back gound –look in task manager
hope ur not trying to run 2 a/v programs
do u hear ur fans
these are a few thing to look at even a faulty ram stick
or a corrupt file
Check the cache you have setup in Firefox. Clear it and set it to the default size. If it’s too big that can cause you problems.
Check to see if your laptop can run Windows 7. If it can then upgrade. I may be a cynic but this sort of problem always seems to happen when MS has released a new OS.