Laptop keeps freezing?

*manda*

I have an 18 month old Dell Inspiron 1525 running on vista. It froze a few weeks ago a few times whilst we were away and using a dongle, and I thought it may just be as I was actually using in on my lap. It has been fine for a few weeks since. Again this weekend whilst away, it has frozen several times, and I have to force it off as it doesn't respond to anything- waiting, Control-alt-del etc. It doesn't do it on any particular sites, and the last time it froze it had only been on around 20 minutes and had been raised an inch off the table on a laptop stand so surely shouldn't have over heated? No other problems, virus screens all up to date and a malware screen found nothing a week ago.

Basil1234

have you checked the fan underneath is spinning up at all e.g. the cpu fan. the otherthing you can do when it is off is hoover out then fan and heatsink at the back they all suck up dust.

if neither of those work i take it all you temp files have been dumped and you have defragged your machine recently? and if that has been done another option is a registry cleaner and a defrag of the registry as well its amazing the amount of people fail to do that and wonder why the computer slows down.
something to consider also is that vista is a great resource hogger for example i had a machine running xp with taking 512mb of ram used out of 2gb switched it to vista same machine used 1gb with no hardware changes!

anyway let us know how you get on.

jetski690

A mate of mine had a similar problem running Windows 7 again with a dongle, after much searching the problem turned out to be AVG, so if you are running that as your anti virus I would change it to Avast.

*manda*

Funnily enough it is on AVG which I had intended to switch to Avast.

There may not be any sense in it, but it worked fine again last night back home on wireless.

I shall try all the clean ups, and change anti virus and see how it goes.

Thanks guys.

Its-A-New-Age-Thing

*manda* wrote: »

I have an 18 month old Dell Inspiron 1525 running on vista. It froze a few weeks ago a few times whilst we were away and using a dongle, and I thought it may just be as I was actually using in on my lap. It has been fine for a few weeks since. Again this weekend whilst away, it has frozen several times, and I have to force it off as it doesn't respond to anything- waiting, Control-alt-del etc. It doesn't do it on any particular sites, and the last time it froze it had only been on around 20 minutes and had been raised an inch off the table on a laptop stand so surely shouldn't have over heated? No other problems, virus screens all up to date and a malware screen found nothing a week ago.

could be ure registry corrupted best to reformat it

jetski690

I think AVG 9.0 is the conflict with the dongle, look here http://www.mrfmanagement.com/?p=80

*manda*

jetski690 wrote: »

I think AVG 9.0 is the conflict with the dongle, look here http://www.mrfmanagement.com/?p=80

I think you're spot on. It ONLY freezes when using the dongle.

So, I'll get rid of AVG, should I uninstall that before I install the new product?

Avast or Microsoft essentials? Any particular advice on which is best?

Fire_Fox

Avast and Avira seem to be the ones frequently recommended on this board.