Laptop locking up....Grrrrrr

[terrain safe]

My wife has a Sony Vaio laptop which she uses all the time. However it has, over the past couple of months, been locking up at regular intervals. It seems that it gets in a loop and she can do nothing with it for up to half an hour. The window that she is using, invariably Firefox or Word, will go 'pale' and the cursor will turn into a blue spinning circle. If you have read this far you will have probably worked out the she is running Vista home premium. She has a Vaio VGN-N21s with one gig of ram. Now I think it may be a ram problem as task manager often shows over 80% of available ram being used so I have just ordered 2 gig of ram from crucial. Have I wasted my money or is this the probable solution? Please help for our sanity!

[Saab Dastard]

If you have just loaded SP1 then it might be a good idea to unload it...

I believe that Sony has relented, and provided XP drivers for all its models... ;)

How about backing up all your data and doing a clean install...
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...of XP?

:p

SD

[Parapunter]

Why not use the tools installed with windows for finding problems & solving them rather than assuming the whole thing is a dud?

In the vista control panel, under system, there is an option called problems & solutions. Any software fault will be logged there. There is also the event viewer which does the same. You wouldn't sell a new car because the headlight broke, so why take the same view with a pc?

[terrain safe]

Ok sorted it out now. Seems to be some form of malware that was continually trying to execute a DLL or two. Adaware was no help, Kaspersky didn't find anything either but IE kept trying to open a window. Used msconfig to see what was loading and the last 2 enties were for a DLL in a temp directory. Couldn't delete the files so started in safe mode and then deleted them. Now all is serene.

ps Why not use the tools installed with windows for finding problems & solving them rather than assuming the whole thing is a dud?

In the vista control panel, under system, there is an option called problems & solutions. Any software fault will be logged there. There is also the event viewer which does the same. You wouldn't sell a new car because the headlight broke, so why take the same view with a pc?

Where did I say I wanted to get rid of the PC? all that was wrong was it was driving me mad.

[Parapunter]

Well done & that wasn't really aimed at you...

How about backing up all your data and doing a clean install...
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...of XP?


More like our esteemed mod, who is not a fan of Vista.:p