Laptop Freezing - Any ideas?

[aphex]

My laptop has been freezing more and more often lately... I can't for the life of me pinpoint it down to any specific app (possibly firefox or Kaspersky AntiVir) but im not sure...

Ill be using the system and suddenly, it stops accessing the hard drive. I can move the mouse, but i cant click on anything. The system dosent seem to be thinking at all. If i press ctrl-alt-del, it brings up the task manager window but freezes there too. The only way i can get the system to keep moving is by holding down CTL-ALT-DEL and let it think for awhile, eventually (usually 3-4 mins later), it seems to clear itself out and start working again.

Well a few mins ago, it did this, i held ctrl-alt-del for a few mins, but when it came back to life, it had a few quirks. #1. Clicking on icons brought up the properties dialog box for that icon (as if i had right clicked and selected properties) and #2. the keyboard stopped working.

WTF is going on?

 

[elmer92413]

Go under Control Panel Classic View...
Go to Administrative Tasks, Event Viewer and see if you can find anything there...
Might help pinpoint the source of your woes...
...
..
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[Atheus]

I read your (slightly different) thread in software just before you moved it, so to answer your original question, you can make Windows do a memory dump when it bluescreens. Can't remember the exact method but google will inform you I'm sure. This will show you what was going on in the crash software-wise.

If I had to fix a machine like yours I would look for viruses and spyware, overheating, hard drive failure, and power supply failure, in that order.

 

[aphex]

Well unfortunately its not bluescreening at any point, its just freezing up in windows...

After the frozen keyboard issue, rebooted, and when it came back into windows, explorer crashed right off the bat... Took me 15 mins from time time it crashed until i could log out and try again....

Went into the Admin Tasks, and for this crash it showed

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Application Error
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1000
Date: 9/9/2006
Time: 5:04:11 PM
User: N/A
Computer: JOSH
Description:
Faulting application explorer.exe, version 6.0.2900.2649, faulting module unknown, version 0.0.0.0, fault address 0x0007df06.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74 Applicat
0008: 69 6f 6e 20 46 61 69 6c ion Fail
0010: 75 72 65 20 20 65 78 70 ure exp
0018: 6c 6f 72 65 72 2e 65 78 lorer.ex
0020: 65 20 36 2e 30 2e 32 39 e 6.0.29
0028: 30 30 2e 32 36 34 39 20 00.2649
0030: 69 6e 20 75 6e 6b 6e 6f in unkno
0038: 77 6e 20 30 2e 30 2e 30 wn 0.0.0
0040: 2e 30 20 61 74 20 6f 66 .0 at of
0048: 66 73 65 74 20 30 30 30 fset 000
0050: 37 64 66 30 36 0d 0a 7df06..

However, each time it froze in the past, there are no errors in any of the logs.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: aphex
Well unfortunately its not bluescreening at any point, its just freezing up in windows...

After the frozen keyboard issue, rebooted, and when it came back into windows, explorer crashed right off the bat... Took me 15 mins from time time it crashed until i could log out and try again....

Went into the Admin Tasks, and for this crash it showed

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Application Error
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1000
Date: 9/9/2006
Time: 5:04:11 PM
User: N/A
Computer: JOSH
Description:
Faulting application explorer.exe, version 6.0.2900.2649, faulting module unknown, version 0.0.0.0, fault address 0x0007df06.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74 Applicat
0008: 69 6f 6e 20 46 61 69 6c ion Fail
0010: 75 72 65 20 20 65 78 70 ure exp
0018: 6c 6f 72 65 72 2e 65 78 lorer.ex
0020: 65 20 36 2e 30 2e 32 39 e 6.0.29
0028: 30 30 2e 32 36 34 39 20 00.2649
0030: 69 6e 20 75 6e 6b 6e 6f in unkno
0038: 77 6e 20 30 2e 30 2e 30 wn 0.0.0
0040: 2e 30 20 61 74 20 6f 66 .0 at of
0048: 66 73 65 74 20 30 30 30 fset 000
0050: 37 64 66 30 36 0d 0a 7df06..

However, each time it froze in the past, there are no errors in any of the logs.

I'd uninstall anything interacting with or adding on to Explorer (divx, codec packs, anything that appears in the context menu when you right-click on a file, zippers, rar'ers, etc...) and then reboot and see if anything different happens.

Another thing to do is remove (ie uninstall) antivirus apps and any apps you've recently installed.

Does this happen in safe mode?

 

[aphex]

nope, in safe mode seems to be fine... uninstalling what i can, thanks for the help thus far...

 

[aphex]

I think it may have been Firefox...

I noticed something interesting after i rebooted... As soon as it got to windows, firefox.exe was showing a 3mb process. Interesting because firefox dosent seem to have anything that runs on startup, and i hadn't even tried to use firefox that session yet.

I uninstalled firefox and now it dosent seem to be freezing... hmmmmm