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Frozen Presario 6000 in Vista

Old 11th Sep 2015, 13:22
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Frozen Presario 6000 in Vista

Searching shows no posting like this for a long time so here goes...

SWMBO has a Compaq Presario V6000 which is heading for retirement. The problem is it seems to have got wind of that and has taken to freezing once or twice a day. The screen image remains fixed and the fan and drive keep turning but there's no response to anything at all on keyboard and mouse. At first everything froze but sometimes, after perhaps 30 minutes, the cursor would start to follow the mouse and then after a bit everything would come to life.
Those days are gone now. While the fan and drive keep going and the display functions, even though frozen, now it never comes back and even the clock stops for the duration.

The computer is not too hot - well nothing that shows on Speccy is too hot.

What do you think has gone wrong and, please, is there a technique to unfreeze it without holding down the power button to start again? Rebooting like that brings up the black and white screen with the suggestion to restart Windows normally and that seems to work fine. On one occasion it wanted to repair Windows but that didn't work so returning to a restore point was the next suggestion and that worked.

Having rebooted, is there any way to establish what went wrong and can I fix it?

Thank you!

Last edited by Cameronian; 11th Sep 2015 at 17:41.
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Old 11th Sep 2015, 14:39
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Some say he was the father of COBOL. The Stig of computers......SD I'm sure he'll be here soon to help.
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Old 11th Sep 2015, 18:19
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First of all, make sure it's not malware.

It does sound like the symptoms of an overheated CPU - but you think it's OK? Can you see what the temps are - tricky, you only want to know when it freezes, when you can't see it, and by the time you can it has cooled down!

Other suspects are memory - although that usually manifests itself as a blue screen or complete and unrecoverable lockup - and disk corruption, but again that tends to have more obvious failure symptoms.

If you can eliminate hardware, then what you have to do is to disable all add-ons and programs that normally run in the background to see if there's an errant process like AV that's hogging all the CPU. I have seen servers brought to their knees by supposedly reputable AV software (McAfee and Kaspersky), so that would be high on my list of suspects. Running two firewalls or two AV scanners can have adverse effects.

But the best way to troubleshoot it is to get a spare hard disk and do a clean install on that, or backup all your data and do a clean install on the existing disk.

If the system is completely unresponsive there's really no alternative to a hard reset. Sometimes with laptops you have to go as far as taking the battery out to make it stop!

SD
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Old 11th Sep 2015, 19:01
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Hi SD! Thank you for having a look and a think.
SWMBO is running the Windows firewall and only one anti-virus (Avast). She does insist on running Google Sync at all times and Mozibackup likewise. Just as an attempt at good practice, the computer and its power supply are on stilts to improve cooling and we have noticed around a five to ten degrees drop in temperature when the computer is working. It should be said though that it was at no stage redlining. Even at the height of summer here the hottest bit, the HDD was only at 48 to 56ºC and now that it's about 8º cooler indoors it seldom show as significantly above 50º. Last night when working hard the Motherboard was at 37º, the Graphics card at 38º and the HDD at 51º.

Because the machine has been freezing fairly frequently over the past couple of weeks I decided last night to bring through my external hard drive to do a full back up and image, independently from her own arrangements (see above). Within twenty minutes the job was about 30% completed which I thought was pretty fair so I tripped off to bed. This morning it had only got as far as 50% or so when my wife started work again at 0800 hrs. At 1126 hrs. when the big crash came my backup had only progressed indiscernibly from where it had been at 0800 hrs.

The machine sat unchanged, but still whirring away, with the clock frozen showing 1126 hrs. until I did a power button turn off at about 1700 hrs. Then it rebooted and the first screen recommended a normal Windows start which went smoothly. My abacus never gave me problems like this....
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Old 11th Sep 2015, 19:26
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She does insist on running Google Sync at all times and Mozibackup likewise
Do try it without those!

Have you looked at the event logs? See if there's a lot of error / warning entries in the system event log, possibly the application log as well.

It's not something as obvious as a completely full system disk? If it looks like there's plenty of space, run chkdsk to see if there's any cross-linked files that are causing a loop on disk access, or indeed any other hard disk errors.

Temp-wise, what are the CPU cores getting up to? My AMD Athlon 64X2 CPU ranges from 38 - 49C depending on ambient and workload, while the GPU can (and does) get up to high 70's safely.

Your HDD does seem pretty hot to me - mine rarely get above 42C, and the SSD never above 30C. I know we don't have summer here in the UK, but still...

If you download and run a benchtesting suite such as Furmark or passmark, you could possibly ramp up the internal temps while monitoring them to see if you can provoke a failure.

SD
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Old 12th Sep 2015, 00:33
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Thank you for all of that, SD. Since a couple, perhaps even more (!), of those suggestions will require me to go back to school (which is good, by the way), I'll give them a shot a bit later on Saturday and will post the results once finished - hopefully before Sunday. I still think laptops are hateful little things which are designed to go wrong and this one never leaves the desk.
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Old 12th Sep 2015, 17:47
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Umm - here are the fruits of my labours but I can't guarantee coherence!

While I was working on your suggestions the CPU varied between 28 and 32ºC, the motherboard from 28 to 34ºC and the HDD was more constant at 42ºC. This was pretty light work and the temperatures were distinctly lower that the totally valid temperatures that I reported above but at least it suggests that the temperatures aren't constantly a little on the high side. I didn't attempt to provoke anything in the way that you suggested at the end of your post..

My malware check, which is done as part of the regular "once-over" at least once a week, was limited to a Malwarebytes scan but came up clear. I don't remember anything being discovered on this computer by Malwarebytes except on its first ever run in early 2007.

Chkdsk showed a remarkable lack of issues. I was surprised.

In the event log there were 3800 notifications, none classed as critical - only errors and advisories, over the last 12 months. The vast majority (although I have to confess to only looking at what I hoped would be a representative sample) were regular repeats which were mainly about printer issues or "RapportKELL" (banking security?). However the last one, about 20 minutes before the computer went into its biggest freeze was an "App crash - GoogleSyncDoc". I didn't have the timings of the other fairly recent crashes from which the machine eventually recovered on its own because I wasn't there when they happened so didn't even try to correlate those with the event logs (by this time it was after 6 am. and the sun was coming up!).

You suggested doing without MozyBackUp and GoogleSyncDoc.... Madame flatly refuses to suspend MBU because she handles a lot of important data for many hours of each day and it has saved her bacon by allowing her to recover files over many years and hasn't seemed to cause problems before. GoogleSyncDoc has only been in use since she switched to Gmail a couple of years ago so she "might consider" suspending it for a trial period of a week. That battle isn't yet completely won though! She is normally disposed to think of me as neurotic when it comes to privacy and security and especially so, rightly or wrongly, where this company is concerned.

I just hope that something jumps out at you from this because it doesn't to me. The app. crash is the only thing but then I have to confess to seeing a certain company as the Great Satan so I may be unreasonably biased....
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Old 12th Sep 2015, 19:23
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App crash - GoogleSyncDoc
That looks like a candidate, so if you run without it for a week (or more) and don't experience problems, perhaps SWMBO might consider removing it as the lesser of 2 evils.

All your temps look perfectly reasonable, so overheating doesn't look like a problem.

it might still be worth running memtest, just to ensure that there's no memory faults. Leave it running overnight, it takes a while!

SD
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Old 12th Sep 2015, 20:33
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Ok, I'll try Memtest, thanks. Now I've got to practise that smile in front of the mirror before trying to sell the GoogleSyncDoc idea.....
It might be a week before I'm back - if I survive!
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Old 13th Sep 2015, 09:06
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Its just possible that the fan/heatsink needs cleaning. This will mean removing the underside case. Its amazing how clogged the vanes in the heat sink get.
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Old 13th Sep 2015, 12:57
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Thanks for that, Avtrician. I've been toying with the idea of checking that, even since before this problem appeared. I've even looked up the instructions for doing it. The temperature check (see post 7, above) suggests that it's not an issue at the moment though so I've shifted the job down my priority list a bit.
The absence of carpets and other warming soft furnishings here on the island, due to the climate, means that there's much less dust and fluff than there would be if the computer's kennel were further North. Lifelong no-smoking means that the sticky stuff doesn't collect on the fan and ducting either. Thanks, though. That job is on my watch list if I don't get anywhere.

Last edited by Cameronian; 13th Sep 2015 at 16:10.
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Old 13th Sep 2015, 16:16
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Hi again, SD. I had a look at Memtest. It looked a bit too scary for the likes of me, I'm afraid. It seemed to be an abandoned orphan child and to have been left uncared for over a long time. I tried the Windows memory test on my computer, using the extended test version, and all went well so I plan to run the same on the Presario overnight tonight.

We've agreed to suspend GoogleSyncDoc for a week if the thing freezes again soon. I sometimes think that someone else gets two votes in this democracy business - mind you, it seems to work better here than in the Labour Party!

Last edited by Cameronian; 13th Sep 2015 at 17:44.
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Old 14th Sep 2015, 11:08
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Well, I ran the Windows Memory Test, which went surprisingly quickly and found no faults at all. Then, almost immediately, the machine froze again - fortunately only a petit-mal this time so it recovered on its own after about 15 minutes. This suggests that not much has changed so far....

I'll check the event viewer for signs of a GoogleSyncDoc App Crash shortly.
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Old 17th Sep 2015, 00:33
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Nope, no luck. It has kept freezing although, so far, it has mostly recovered on its own after about half an hour. Temperatures remain as above so I don't think they are the cause of all of this. Twice in the last few days it has not recovered spontaneously and has had to be rebooted. The Google SyncDoc "App Crash" notice on Event Viewer has not yet reappeared before any of the crashes.

Just to answer one other suggestion made a few days ago, the HDD is around 75% full so has 25% free space. The huge swings in free space of old seem no longer to be evident since a round of updates to Vista a couple (-ish) of months ago so the 25% free space is happily pretty much a constant nowadays.

I know that it's on its way out but I hope to achieve a planned escape from it at around Christmas. It would be great if it could be coaxed into surviving that long so ideas will be gratefully received and enthusiastically tested. Thank you.
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Old 17th Sep 2015, 07:25
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Had a similar problem many moons ago with an old and much used Dell. Solved it by removing the RAM chips and then reinserting. Figured out that as the machine became warm the slight expansion caused the chips to loosen. Give it a try and while the sides are off the machine clean out any air vents.
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Old 19th Sep 2015, 23:29
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Thanks Geoff, sorry for the delay but have been super-occupied. The machine in question is a Compaq Presario V6216EA so it's not too similar to your big Dell. Getting to the memory isn't, I think, too difficult though so I'll add that to my not very long list of things to try.

I think that this machine is at RAM max with 2Gb. Since one explanation of the freezing given to me was that it was due to a dying HDD, I've been trying to find out how big a drive can be recognised and used in this machine. Some reports say 200Gb, others say 320 Gb. One article even said 500 Gb or more but I'm not too convinced by that advice. In any event changing it might be a very cheap fix (or, perhaps, not) and doubling the disk capacity would give it a new lease of life. I wish that I could find an authoritative source of information because there are so many versions of this computer.
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Old 20th Sep 2015, 10:55
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When Compaq / HP brought out the V6000, the HDD sizes they provided were 80-200GB, but this was down far more to available capacities and costs than for technical limitations - this was 2007, after all!

See: www.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01035886.pdf

If your system drive controller supports SATA drives, then it supports 48-bit LBA and can support HDDs much larger (PB size!) than those originally specified by Compaq. Of course, if it is ATA 5 only, then you might be out of luck - but that's highly unlikely in 2007.

The other thing is the BIOS limitations - before 2002, 137GB was the limit, after that most BIOSs supported up to 2TB, so your BIOS is likely to support 2TB disks, as will Vista.

So assuming that your system has a SATA HDD, you can install a disk up to 2TB.

SD
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Old 20th Sep 2015, 15:52
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I am indebted to you once again SD! According to my friend Speccy, what it has is "SATA Type, SATA-1 with firmware version 892C".

If the idea that the error which started this off may be down to a dying HDD is not off the wall - mind you, I've read of all sorts of other possibilities - then it may make sense to get my hands on a significantly larger drive. One might say that, whether it fixes the original problem or not, the current one is full-ish and needs replaced for that alone. Should it not fix the freezing problem then it will always be useful and it has the plus point of being cheap and diy-able.

Is there a reasonable chance that it might fix the freezing, now that we've looked at a few other possible explanations of the fault with no luck so far, or are the chances vanishingly small?
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Old 20th Sep 2015, 16:49
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With SATA 1, you will get the best performance / £ from a 7200RPM HDD rather than an SSD. Put it another way, you won't see a noticeable gain from using an SSD with SATA1.

If the HDD is very full, you can see some serious slowing down, but not to the level you have reported.

SD
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