What Causes "Program Not Responding" Messages?

Truegho

After so long on my Acer laptop, I get "Program not responding" messages as my laptop suddenly freezes and grinds to a complete halt. Even when I repeatedly press Control, Alt + Delete, the laptop still hangs. Does anybody know what causes these annoying freezes and the "not responding" messages? Is it insufficient RAM, spyware or what?

busenbust

Truegho wrote: »

After so long on my Acer laptop, I get "Program not responding" messages as my laptop suddenly freezes and grinds to a complete halt. Even when I repeatedly press Control, Alt + Delete, the laptop still hangs. Does anybody know what causes these annoying freezes and the "not responding" messages? Is it insufficient RAM, spyware or what?

Which program? All programs? Identical set of problems?

fwor

From what you've said so far, it could be one of many things. You don't say what OS, but with any recent version of Windows it is unlikely to be insufficient RAM, because the OS should just start paging memory on and off the hard disk, and things will just slow down.

One possibility is faulty RAM. That one should be easy to test simply by downloading and running Memtest86. Note that you will need to boot the laptop from the resulting CD.

One thing you can ~probably~ rule out for now is CPU overheating, as that generally just causes the CPU to halt without generating any error messages.

aliEnRIK

Checking for nasties is the obvious thing to do before looking at hardware etc

How much RAM does it have?


Download MALWAREBYTES (Make sure you click 'DOWNLOAD LATEST VERSION')
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Open malwarebytes and goto UPDATE and click 'check for updates'. After its updated goto SCANNER and click PERFORM FULL SCAN then click SCAN
Post the COMPLETE log here AFTER youve deleted everything it finds

reboot
Download HIJACK THIS (Make sure you click 'DOWNLOAD LATEST VERSION')
http://www.filehippo.com/download_hijackthis/
Click MAIN MENU then DO A SYSTEM SCAN AND SAVE A LOGFILE(Takes seconds) then post the log so we can see whats running
(do NOT do anything else with Hijack but scan and post the FULL log)

Truegho

Hi everybody. Thanks for your advice on my annoying "Prog not responding" problem. Regarding your question "which program?", this error can occur on any web page I may happen to be browsing.

busenbust wrote: »

Which program? All programs? Identical set of problems?

fwor

Truegho wrote: »

Hi everybody. Thanks for your advice on my annoying "Prog not responding" problem. Regarding your question "which program?", this error can occur on any web page I may happen to be browsing.

So your browser stops responding. As you don't say which browser, I'd guess that would be IE.

This is definitely more likely to be malware than a hardware problem - do as Rik suggested.

busenbust

busenbust wrote: »

Which program? All programs? Identical set of problems?

Truegho wrote: »

Hi everybody. Thanks for your advice on my annoying "Prog not responding" problem. Regarding your question "which program?", this error can occur on any web page I may happen to be browsing.

Could you try an alternative browser perhaps: Firefox, Opera, IE...

Truegho

I use Firefox browser.

fwor wrote: »

So your browser stops responding. As you don't say which browser, I'd guess that would be IE.

This is definitely more likely to be malware than a hardware problem - do as Rik suggested.

jbreckmckye

What sorts of pages cause the problems? Pages that use Adobe Flash? Old versions of Flash can be a bit buggy; old versions of Firefox are sometimes not keen on *new* versions of Flash...

Laz123

I use firefox occaisionally and it can freeze on some sites but not others. It may be due to some add-ons.