Dell Inspiron 6000 still being crap

Basil_Fawlty

Hi guys,

My laptop (Dell Inspiron 6000, Pentium M 1.6Ghz, 512MB RAM) today went nuts again on me. The page file usage rocketed to 930MB, which is odd considering I've only got 512MB RAM it all happened when I copied some text from IE into Word and Word then asked viaZonealarm to access the internet - I clicked deny and then word crashed on me. The processor went to 100% and did for the next 20 mins till I restarted it. The screen froze and wouldn't do anything except move the cursor about.

After about 20 mins it responded and I got it to restart. it's not the first time it's done this and I really do regret going to Dell. Is there anything you techies can decipher from this? I've done a screenshot if that helps...

scheming_gypsy

the PageFile isn't running off Ram but hard disk space that you've got allocated for it.
You'd be best doing a screen print of the processes as well so we can see what's using the resources.

scheming_gypsy

filter the processes by highest CPU useage before screen shotting it,

albertross_2

spaceage wrote:

it's not the first time it's done this and I really do regret going to Dell.

It's a software crash, and nothing to do with the make of your laptop, try killing winword.exe in the processes tab, it's trying to connect to the internet, and you blocked it with ZA, hence the crash.

You may want to turn of crash dumps, to stop the long wait when something crashes.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=307973

Basil_Fawlty

Thanks both - I'll stop the crashdump thing in a moment...

It happened as another "one-off" but I will do a screenshot of process should it happen again. I actually did end up forcing word to close and lost the changes I'd made in the process (no sign of autorecover :rolleyes: )

I did look at the processes but there were about 2-3 applications eating up about 24% CPU usage - can't remember what they were though. Will remember next time

yeah i know probably not because it's dell but i'm not happy with it at all - it heats up a lot on the right and other people on here with the same model don't have that