<font color="gold">Hiya, guys. Need some technical help.
I recently bought myself a laptop, XP Home being it's operative system. I've heard that it is very bugged, but I didn't know it was this bad. Every time I use it, it randomly freezes, of no apparent reason. Sometime it goes good for 10 minutes before it freezes, sometimes only in two minutes.
Anybody know what's wrong? The only way to continue using it is to hold in the power-button for maybe ten seconds, after which the laptop shuts down. Then I can start it again, but it always freezes after a short period of time.
Please guys, this is incredibly annoying. Any help appreciated. [img]smile.gif[/img] </font>

#1 did you get all the drivers installed?
#2 did you get all of the windows updates from the official updater site?
#3 are your fan vents blocked causing it to overheat and lock up?

xp is very buggy, and you should download all the updates onto the new system, otherwise, you are gonna deal with this all the time

<font color="gold">1) Yep
2) Nope, haven't gotten online with it yet. That ISP is failing me.
3) They're not blocked, but they seem to be running for full all the time.

I'll get all patches and stuff tomorrow, when I have a connection on it.</font>

<font color="gold">Alright, now I've downloaded and installed all patches and updates, but it still keeps happening. It might be caused by overheat, but I doubt it, as all the fan vents are open/not blocked, and they're not running as fast and noisy as they did yesterday.
Any ideas?</font>

On my computer at home I have got XP professional and think that it only froze two times since I got it (4 months ago), though I've never tried home. Are'nt the hard drives too full?

This does sound like an overheat issue. I would suggest drivers as well, but laptops are built to a known configuration, so it would be very rare for a driver issue to be this serious. Still, it very rarely hurts to upgrade drivers.

Also, go into control panel, system, advanced, startup and recovery, and uncheck the 'restart automaticaly' box. That should let you see the BSOD and might give a hint to whats going on.

I have never seen XP freezing and I´ve used several computers that has it. I wonder if home and pro editions haven´t got so much of in common after all, because I use pro and it works like a dream.

But to your problem, it has to be overheating.. keep us updated..

If it is overheat then
1. Go :mad: at the selling shop because they sold you a badly assembled system.
2. Try a software cooler (like CPUidle) as this doesn't require any hardware changes.

It DOES sound like a serious hardware issue. Overheating is most likely but it could also be a defective HD or broken RAM.

You might also check the Event Log (is that still buried somewhere in XP?) for ideas about what may have gone bad.

Sometimes, a software reinstall can clean things up. I'll be doing one next week.

<font color="gold">@Andrewas: I checked the box, then unchecked it, but nothing happened. What is this BSOD, anyway?

@Faceman: Where can I get a CPUidle, or familiar programs? My local PC-shop?

@Bung: I found something called eventlog.dll, but when I tried opening it in Notepad, I only got gibberish.

My problem still stands, but I appreciate the replies. [img]smile.gif[/img] </font>

<font color="gold">Bumping to the top... Somehow, it stayed at the bottom even though I replied.</font>

BSOD = Blue Screen of Death. With that box checked, the computer will restart and you dont get the chance to see the errors. Ideal for a server that has to be up as much as possible, not so good for the machine your trying to diagnose. Leave the box unchecked, and when it crashes you should get the blue screen - copy down the error messages given.

Google. Wonderful invention. More specificaly:
http://www.cpuidle.de/

Control panel, administration tools, event viewer. Look for events in the system log at about the time of the crashes.

I can't offer any help, but my advice is to go with windows XP pro...never had any problems with that, and it is a newer version. However, my friend had XP Hme running on his PC and it ran perfectly, so I would guess it is indeed a hardware issue.

Not eventlog.dll, although they're probably related: The Event Log.

Somewhere, Windows has a critter called the Event Log or Event Viewer. It exists in NT, IIRC, and 2000, and I believe in XP. Look around in Control Panel or Accessories for it. It shows what happens internally when the system boots and often when it crashes, so you get a better chance to see what blew up.

On Monday I'll be back on a Win2k machine and can give you more thoughts, if needed. I'm too lazy to boot it tonight... :D

*edit* Sarcasm smiley, where's the 1#$!#$ sarcasm smiley when you need it? */edit*

[ 10-04-2003, 10:33 PM: Message edited by: Bungleau ]

<font color="gold">[sarcasm] My system freezes all the time, therefore I have to get a program which cools it. :D [/sarcasm]

So anyway, thanks for the link, Andrewas. I'll download it ASAP. [img]smile.gif[/img] I'll also check the Event Log, just to see if I can understand anything of what's going on. [img]smile.gif[/img] </font>

Type msconfig at the run command and disable the startup group. See if that helps.

Mark

<font color="gold">Updating...
CpuIdle seems to have done it. Hasn't frozen once since I started using it. [img]smile.gif[/img]
Thanks for all the help guys. [img]smile.gif[/img] </font>

Right, now we know its a cooling problem.

The thing is, CPUidle works by turning off the processor while its not in use, thus generating less heat. Problem - if you start a program that uses the processor a lot, CPUidle has no idle cycles to work with and you get the crashes again.

I would return the laptop. If you really want to, crack it open and reseat the heatsink(s) using a proper thermal compound (this voids your warranty). Maybe lap the heatsinks as well. But theres not a whole lot you can do to cool a laptop, they have virtualy no space to work with.

It might also be beneficial to underclock it in BIOS - try to turn down the FSB. The laptop will be slower, but cooler. But returning the laptop for one that runs stably in its default configuration would be the best thing.