Freezing - Please help!

cazkins

Hello,

I hope everyone’s well. I was wondering if someone could please help me? I’m getting desperate & need to fix my laptop!

I’ve got a 9 month old Toshiba (a cute thing when he was a baby) running Vista. 3 days ago it started to freeze when running Internet Explorer (8) or any other software like Microsoft Word, either when running together or separately. I’ve gone through any newly updated or downloaded software but can’t find anything that may have caused it. When in Hotmail, I sometimes get a ‘script is causing … to run slowly, abort?’ message. Otherwise the computer just freezes up – sometimes it happens after just a few seconds, other times it will seem okay for 10-15 minutes and then freeze. Once frozen, ctrl alt delete doesn’t work and I have to turn it off manually and restart.

I’ve got AVG free which found nothing, and I downloaded Malwarebytes as per a post I saw on this forum but that also found nothing.

I’m not sure whether this is a software/hardware problem.. Any ideas what could be wrong, or what I can do please? Any thoughts would be much appreciated as it’s driving me mad and I rely so heavily on this laptop! (It’s taken me 2 restarts just to get to the end of this message!)

Thank you very much in advance!

dogmaryxx

Try running

http://fixitcenter.support.microsoft.com/Portal

PHYTHIAN

Close Word and IE.

Open Task Manager. What is the CPU usage? How many processes are running? (Processes tab). How many items are ticked under the Start Up tab?

Once you have noted those...leave Task Manager open and start up Word. The CPU usage should shoot up momentarily and then settle down again. Does it stay at 100%? If not, close it and do the same with IE.

If you have run a malware scan and antivirus and both are clear your problem lies in the number of things you have running. Post back the answers to above and it should be fairly easy to resolve!!!!

cazkins

dogmaryxx - Wow, what a straightforward fix-it solution! I've run through the relevant ones & fingerscrossed it's worked... I'll know soon enough! Thank you very much for posting.

Phythian - thanks for your reply! I think I do have too many things running, I'll take a look at that now.. Glad to hear it seems easily fixable


Okay - CPU at 1-3% (no IE/Word). Physical memory total 2939, free 223. There are 31 processes running, but I don't know what half of them are; there's a lot of .exe ones, such as igfxpers.exe, igfxtray.exe, hkcmd.exe.

CPU does shoot up and down etc when word/IE opened.

spud17

If you're unsure, download and run Startuplite this can give you some initial suggestions, without you having to make a decision.

You can easily disable/re-enable, so difficult to cause problems, fingers crossed. :cool:


Also for running processes, 31 for Vista seems low, please make sure the 'show processes for all users' box is ticked.
I'd expect around 50/60.

PHYTHIAN

For the .exe files you don't understand ...just google them and you will be able to see what it is. I've never used startuplite, so may be worth giving that a go!!

Also agree that 31 does seem really low. I have as few running as possible and mine is 42!!

Glad to hear you seem to be getting somewhere

cazkins

I just wanted to say thank you very much for all your help - my laptop seems to be working fine now, though I can't put my finger on what exactly fixed it as I tried every suggestion! Thanks again