<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.