Randomness of Laptop!

[polomint]

Hello all,

Recently my laptop has been very slow to boot up and on occasion during shutdown will effectively just 'freeze' so that i am forced to turn it off(no ctrl alt del option). It usually freezes on the 'windows is shutting down page.

Any suggestions?

Really have no clue, and do my 'housekeeping regularly.

Thanks

Polo

[Irish Steve]

Need more info.

First is it a recent Dell. If it is, then ( sit down before you read this next bit) the HDD could be on the way out, there have been MASSIVE problems with Hitachi/IBM HDD's on Dell laptops over the last number of months, to the extent that Dell are now supplying Fujitsu drives as replacements. As an indication, a good friend of mine in Salzburg has had 3 replacement 80 Gb HDDs in less than 6 months, and it's not a quick job to replace them, even with Ghost or similar, and if you have to do a complete reload from CD's, which I nearly did have to do last weekend, plan on a couple of days work!

Hopefully, it's not a Dell.

In that case, several possibilities.

It might have a driver that's hanging, but not being used, such as network, so when it tries to close it down, it never responds.

Could be asware or spyware causing problems, try running a check or using hijack this to see what's happening, links to that package are all over the place here.

Another possibility is that the disc might be getting very close to full, or is in need of a defragment, if the swap file can't expand, or is badly fragmented, that can play hell with the performance.

If there's several anti virus or firewall packages running, another possibility is that you're getting tight on memory, and it's constantly swapping stuff in and out of "real" memory. Some of the Anti Virus packages ( especially Norton) are real memory hogs, and they've also grown big time in recent months due to all the new garbage that's coming down the line.

Not sure I can suggest anything else till we know a bit more about the configuration and what's running.

[polomint]

Irish,

Firstly thanks for replying..appreciate it.

Ok I dont know a great dael about comps but thankfully its not a dell..its an Advent.

Have checked adware and spyware..no apparent cause.

Defragmented last week.

Whats the driver thingy about and yes I do use Norton but nowhere near memory capacity..all very strange!

Polo:confused:

[Irish Steve]

OK, a few more Q's. Which operating system, Win 98, 98SE, 2000, ME or XP?

Is it connected to a network at all, or anything else "external".

It's possible that there is a problem with Norton, I've had some "issues" with it in recent times where it does not completely close clean on shutdown. On XP, the machine sorts itself out, but on 98, that can very easily end up with it on the "the machine is shutting down" screen for ever. What's happened is that 98 has said to a driver (that's an internal programme routine that makes the machine do something specific with a program or piece of hardware) "please close", and for some reason, it's not seen the reply correctly, so 98 sits there for ever waiting for a reply that's it's gone, which it never gets.

There are other possibilities. Has this started happening recently, and have there been any changes to the machine around the same time (maybe a USB printer added, or software for a digital camera added, things like that) or have you installed any new software recently.

Sorry if this seems a little vague at the moment, it's going to take a little while to narrow down the area of hassle before we can try to nail specific things more accurately. Even then, it might be luck, with some versions, there are know problems with shut down that never got completely cleaned up. All we can do for now is try and narrow it down a little.

Cheers