way to find out why laptop freezes?

JohnB47

Our 6 year old Toshiba laptop has been freezing, on and off, for quite a few months now. It happens mainly when either me or the wife tries to put it in standby (with or without the other logged in). It freezes with the home screen showing, sometimes with icons showing, sometimes not. If icons show, trying to open an application causes the cursor to change to the hourglass symbol for a few seconds before reverting to the arrow again. Using ctrl/alt/delete, to look at processes, does nothing. At this point the hard drive indicator shows low but frequent hard drive use.

I've scanned using avg free and malwarebites (but not the rootkits bit). Malwarebites found a few things, two of them 'major' but it hasn't cleared the problem.

Is there anything I can do to identify what the pc is doing at the point of freeze? Some sort of monitoring program would be great, but then I would have to interpret the results.

Any thoughts?

bsod

when you standby, or afterwards? use hibernate instead of standby, reduce the number of non microsoft startup items to a minumum, if it's not cured, do a reinstall of windows otherwise you'll spend ages hunting for a reason to no avail. The best diagnostic tool is this http://download.sysinternals.com/files/ProcessMonitor.zip
but it can take a significant amount of knowledge and time to interpret the output, and it may not work very well if the machine is in a hung state or in the middle of a resume from standby

JohnB47

bsod wrote: »

when you standby, or afterwards? use hibernate instead of standby, if no luck, do a reinstall of windows otherwise you'll spend ages hunting for a reason.

It's when I attempt to enter standby ie start/power off computer/standby. It's a windows xp laptop btw.

Fair enough about hibernate but it used to enter standby ok in the past.

Anyone know if there's some sort of logging program that I could run in the background and then access after a freeze and restart? I remember having a problem with hotmail and they sent me a program to do just that. I ran it until I hit the problem, then sent them the results. They fixed the problem fairly quickly. I know there's no chance of Microsoft doing that but just wondered of there is an equivalent.

Thanks.

spongebobbrownpants

Standby will try to put everything currently active into memory (ram), check what you have running in the background, may be too much going on ? The sysinternals link from bsod earlier will let you do this.

JohnB47

Thanks. I see bsod has now added that to his post - I might have missed it if you hadn't mentioned it. Thanks bsod. I'll certainly try that, although as said the results may prove too much for me. I'll report back with progress or further questions about running the tool.

Laz123

Also have a look in event viewer. I don't know why in today's technology it isn't more user-friendly to interpret error codes but maybe one day a clever coder will produce an answer.

NiftyDigits

Full model number?

JohnB47

NiftyDigits wrote: »

Full model number?

Toshiba Satellite Pro A100 Model PSAAPE-00T00KEN

Thanks for any help.