Forum Settings
       
Reply To Thread

Don't know what I did to my laptop, but it keeps locking up.Follow

#1 Jul 01 2014 at 10:57 AM Rating: Good
***
3,053 posts
Really I'm at a lost here and only hope the computer tech, my daughter is currently living with can figure things out and fix my computer this evening, when he comes over. Right now I'm using our backup desktop with Windows XP on it, that I built for Jonwin years ago. Just in case anyone one has any ideas of what could be wrong, I'm also posting here.

Sorry for the narrative, but my mind just works this way.

Now I'm very careful with this machine and try not to load anything I don't need for business except for my steam account, but Sunday I suddenly found myself unable to do anything on it, without it locking up in minutes of turning it on. It took me all day Monday to just try to get Norton Utilities updated and running, only to have the system lock up in the middle of a virus scan. I trying running Malwarebytes, but that too just could run do to the system locking up.

So what did I do before all hell broke out with my laptop. Well Friday I downloaded Adobe Lightroom, with of course means now you get Creative Cloud installed too. That work fine, when I tried it out Saturday, after watching a few tutorials. The real problem started after I looked at a few web hosting sites and decided to get my domain name through Network Solutions without first asking for advice here. I used their web designer software to create a basic under construction page and then set up 2 email accounts, of which I could only get into one, since I have a habit of not writing down passwords. To use Outlook with it, they wanted me to update Outlook with https://webmail3.networksolutionsemail.com/ox.html#. That were the problem seems to have started. Though with just 4gigs of memory, Creative Cloud could be causing problem too.

If we can't get the computer working then we take it to Micro Center, where I bought it for repairs.
____________________________
In the place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen! Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the Morn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair! -ElneClare

This Post is written in Elnese, If it was an actual Post, it would make sense.
#2 Jul 01 2014 at 7:01 PM Rating: Excellent
Avatar
******
29,919 posts
Could be a couple different things going on here. Adobe lightroom is not a particularily small program, so depending on where you downloaded and saved it, then extracted it, you may have potentially managed to fill up your hard drive (c:\) If you can get into the computer far enough to check that, you should be able to delete something and alleviate the problem if that is it. Another possibility is that you now have too many startup programs running and you are exceeding the amount of ram or processing power you have available at startup. This can be a particularly bad issue if you are running on a single core processor. 4GB ram is also really low for running windows 7 these days. To check if you are maxed out on resources, press Ctrl+alt_del and select "start task manager" and click on the "performance" tab. If you see CPU or Memory usage pegged at 100% for a long period of time, something is using up all the resources, and your computer is unhappy because of it. If this area looks normal and you don't see high usage, that would be indicative of hard drive issues of some sort.

If you do see high usage, go to the processes tab, and click on the CPU heading listing to sort by the highest resource users. At idle state you should see "system idle process' using most, if not all of the processor. If you see something else using a large portion of those resources, or multiple somethings using all the resources, that can be indicative of a virus or just normal operations not having enough available horsepower to process. Do the same thing for the Memory header and see if anything in particular is latched on to a large chunk of memory at startup (anything bigger than 35,000k is worth looking at, or if you see lots of smaller things that appear to be named random character garbage names like jhsgejlghsjdbg.exe, or other multiple named files. Svchost.exe may be in there multiple times, and a few of them aren't going to be a problem. if you see 20-30 of them though, you may have an infection.

Depending on the age of this system, you could also be running into hard drive failure. If this is an older than 3 years old computer,. I would power it down, take it into the repair place, and ask them to run a hardware scan on the drive and check if it is intact. Extremely slow booting followed by a lockup can be the first stage of hard drive bearing failure. If that is what is occurring, you have a very limited amount of run time remaining on that drive, and should concentrate your efforts on ensuring you have backup copies of any important files and that those backups are not stored on the same hard drive.

if you can get it to run, Speedfan (direct download link: http://www.almico.com/speedfan449.exe ) has a hard drive SMART error monitoring piece. Install that, open it, and click on the SMART tab, then select your hard drive from the drop down list (for a laptop there will usually only be one) then look at the two rating bars at the bottom for "fitness" and "performance". if either of those are lower than 92%, immediately shut off the machine and let us know here. Less than 92% means your hard drive is dying and you need to take the drive to a specialist who can preserve your data if there is anything on that drive you don't already have backed up. If it checks out in the above 95% range, you probably aren't dealing with a failing drive hardware issue.

Ram stick can also go bad over time. if it isn't using all the resources and still keeps locking up, you may have a bad stick. Usually the symptoms of that are "the computer is running along fine and then all the sudden Blue screen!". Slow boot and run can be a symptom of that, but its less common.

____________________________
Arch Duke Kaolian Drachensborn, lvl 95 Ranger, Unrest Server
Tech support forum | FAQ (Support) | Mobile Zam: http://m.zam.com (Premium only)
Forum Rules
#3 Jul 02 2014 at 9:56 AM Rating: Good
***
3,053 posts
Computer is one year old Asus K55N series with win8.1 installed. It came with win8.

The daughter BF did scans using thumb drive and found a few hard drive errors and fix them. Still I can't get it to work for more then a few minutes, so it's going to repair shop for check up and adding another 4 GB ram, since it can only handle up to 8 GB DDR3 1600 MHz SDRAM ;p

Going to have to remove a few extra apps that I don't use. and narrow down the playable games to just CIV5 and Windows Solitaire.

I'm going to buy a thumb drive that I can back up on too.
____________________________
In the place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen! Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the Morn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair! -ElneClare

This Post is written in Elnese, If it was an actual Post, it would make sense.
#4 Jul 02 2014 at 12:51 PM Rating: Excellent
Avatar
******
29,919 posts
Ohhhh... it's widnows 8. Yeah, when the windows 8 core gets unhappy and destabilizes, it generally doesn't fix well. You pretty much have to reinstall it which is admittedly less invsive than previous window reinstalls, but its still a pain.
____________________________
Arch Duke Kaolian Drachensborn, lvl 95 Ranger, Unrest Server
Tech support forum | FAQ (Support) | Mobile Zam: http://m.zam.com (Premium only)
Forum Rules
#5 Jul 02 2014 at 4:24 PM Rating: Good
***
3,053 posts
Well the techs at Micro Center now have it to work on. It did lock up as the guy at the counter tried to check the hard drive in Safe Mode. So as your first post suggest it may be a hard drive starting to fail. They will call me once they know for sure. While they have it open I'm having them upgrade the memory to 8 GB too.
____________________________
In the place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen! Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the Morn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair! -ElneClare

This Post is written in Elnese, If it was an actual Post, it would make sense.
#6 Jul 07 2014 at 1:23 PM Rating: Good
***
3,053 posts
Computer is now repaired with new HD installed. Now the fun of getting all he software reinstalled and configured correctly.
____________________________
In the place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen! Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the Morn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair! -ElneClare

This Post is written in Elnese, If it was an actual Post, it would make sense.
#11 Feb 28 2015 at 2:57 PM Rating: Decent
My computer kept locking up and even powering down. I took it to Geek Squad 4 times and they said it was ok. I took it one more time to another Geek Squad before they even acknowledged there was even a problem with it. I declined to let them ship it off and took it to another shop. The new shop found it was the processor and it was on it's last leg after 3 year.
Necro Warning: This post occurred more than thirty days after the prior, and may be a necropost.
Reply To Thread

Colors Smileys Quote OriginalQuote Checked Help

 

Recent Visitors: 5 All times are in CST
Anonymous Guests (5)