[Therev1]

I purchased an HP Vista Premium notebook a little over two months ago. At no particular time, running no particular program, doing no particular activity, IT WILL FREEZE. It happens unexpectedly and regularly. I'll notice that my mouse freezes, I cannot use the touchpad or keyboard, cannot even get Task Manager to help me out. The only thing I can do is a hard reboot (off/on). I have contacted HP support on three occasions, done three clean installs (what a hassle), used the HP Hard Drive Self Test (passed twice), run the chkdisk in HP recovery mode (no problem), upgraded my BIOS, run MemTest86 (passed twice), checked for program conflicts ... the problem still continues. Right now, besides this really frustrating issue (it sometimes come at critical times), I really like Vista. The pc itself is "flying" in as far as performance is concerned. Does anyone have any ideas? Is this just a Vista bug? I am not a techy. I do a lot of googleing, but cannot find any solutions.

Please help
Thanks

[Advertisements]

Could you please list all of your system specs.

[PsychPosse]

Could you please list all of your system specs.

[Therev1]

Hi Psych ...

Thanks for your help.

HP Pavilion dv6605us Notebook
Windows Vista Premium
AMD Athlon 64X2
NVIDIA MCP67M
2G RAM, 160G Hard Disk

I'm really not a techy. What else?

Thanks

Therev1

[PsychPosse]

I am really not sure what the issues are with your system. I just wanted to get more information so others who view this can have something to work with too.

Have you done all the important Windows updates and HP updates?

So many possibilities right now. We need to narrow it down.

Could be fautly RAM, maybe Explorer is hanging up...

Try looking in:
Start / Control Panel / Problem Reports and Solutions / View Problem Hisotry (on the left sidepanel)

and see what it shows. I have found logs made in there that I was unaware of.

Edited by PsychPosse, 17 January 2008 - 09:24 PM.

[Therev1]

Psych

As per HP Tech help, I've done 2 System Restores (clean install). I've run the HP Hard Disk Self Test twice (all passed). I've run chkdisk from Recovery Mode. Bios update. Memtest86 (twice passed all). HP updates, Windows updates.

Now that you mention it, of late I get these screens where it says something like "Explorer has stopped working". Other times it's "X Program has stopped working". Could this mean anything?

The only thing I previously saw (and erased) in Problems and Reports is the instances when Explorer and others stopped working, and a couple of programs which said that they had stopped due to compatibility.

Suggestions?

[PsychPosse]

So what programs stop responding?

Explorer and Vista have not been getting along on all occasions. I have had my share of troubles here. I have left it alone for the most part and it seems to have worked itself out over some time. (no idea how)

If you google for "Vista explorer freeze" you will see that many others have been having problems too. Some say that adjusting the paging file, or disabling it, has solved their problem. Some say that disabling the search indexing has solved the problem. Others blame it on 3rd party software applications that are not getting along with Vista/Explorer.

The next time you get an explorer log in the problems folder, dont delete it. It should tell you a bit about what program it was having trouble with.

Sorry I am not of much help right now.

[Therev1]

Psych:

First of all, did the Explorer/Vista conflict cause you freezes? My pc froze once at the Welcome/username screen. Do you suggest I adjust/disable paging (what would be the effect?)? I think indexing can be disabled, right?

The program which has mostly stopped working is "Ashampoo Anti-Spyware". But this was installed relatively of late. I think the freezes started before. I have considered deleting some programs that I really feel are not that Vista-compatible (even though they may say so and/or they're running as backward compatible). What do you think?

Now this was really weird this morning. I turned on my PC (all LEDs went on ... my pc has lots) ... then I heard the "soft click" that sounds when it finally shuts down, and the LEDs went off (as if it shut down) ... then the LEDs came right back ... then the "soft click"/no LEDs, again ... then a screen that said "resuming Windows" ... then straight to my desktop (never got the Welcome/Username screen requesting my password!) All this took 3-5 seconds; the fastest boot ever, but weird.

Any help? ... and YES you have been a help!

I'll google for the "Vista Explorer freeze".

Thanks