I was Googling around to try to find a solution to my wife’s laptop problem and found a topic “Laptop Freezes After Startup” topic 308425 by q_lil_grl in Oct. 2011 that sounded very similar but as the discussion progressed the symptoms were different.
The laptop is a Sony Vaio VGN-CS110E. It’s running Windows Vista Home Premium, SP2.
Intel T5800 Core 2 Duo @ 2Ghz
Memory: 3Gb
32 bit OS.
Over the past few months it would occasionally hang/freeze (spinning cursor). CTRL-ALT-DEL had no effect. I had to do a hard reset (hold down Power button). I’d boot up in SAFE mode and take a look around before restarting in normal mode.
A few days ago the situation got worse. It’d hang randomly within a few minutes after booting.
I tried running diagnostics and the CPU, memory and display checks all ran fine. The disk check would find some errors but fix them. I assume these were due to the improper shutdowns.
I tried to eliminate everything – unplug external disk, turn off network, remove mouse…. But it didn’t change.
Tried to RESTORE to a save point, but it said there weren’t any. This sounded really strange since I know that many times it creates one when doing OS upgrades and things.
Tried various things over the next couple of days since I’d like to avoid doing a full system restore, but had no success. Now I see that there are three save points, but they’re all from the past two days so I didn’t bother.
I took the advice of The Admiral of booting up in SAFE mode and in msconfig I disabled all of the non-Microsoft services and all startup tasks. On the next bootup, I simply tried to play the sample bear video in Windows Media Player in a loop to see if the system would keep working. After just a few minutes the bear video froze, followed by the sound dying, but the video player bar continued to the end of the video.
On the next boot I hit F8 to get into System Recovery. I ran Startup Repair which fixed disk errors. I rebooted and again started the bear video loop. After a few minutes it froze again. I tried to click windows front/back (sometimes worked) and hit Ctrl-Alt-Del (nothing). Eventually it went to a black screen. After about a minute a Dialog box came up saying “Login process has failed to create the security options dialog” in the header and “Failure – Security Options” in the window along with an OK button. Hitting OK just returns to the normal, frozen display.
I’ve re-run the scenario multiple times and it appears that it’s freezing about 2.5 to 3 minutes in.
Questions? Suggestions?
Thanks in advance for your assistance.