Vista locks up when left alone for extended periods

Toefoo

Hey H/A,

I've had this laptop since March this year, and everything is still going great...with one caveat...for some reason, starting a week ago, Vista freezes if I leave my laptop idle for a while (20+ mins). At first I thought it had something to do with Sleep Mode, so I disabled it. However, even without it going to sleep, if there's no input from me for 20+ mins it will lock up and require a hard reboot.

I've ran multiple virus scans (AVG, McCafee online scan, Ad-Aware, SpyBot, HijackThis) and come up with just tracking cookies every so often (no viruses or anything). I've updated video drivers, defragged, used disk cleanup, and nothing seems to be working.

Has anyone experienced this or know what might be wrong? HP tech support was a crap shoot.

Raere

Run memtest.

KVW

Try downloading Ubuntu (or some other Linux distro) and booting it up either from a HDD install or run it from the disc and see if they lock up after 20 mins or so. You could run Vista in safemode for a bit and see if it's Vista or something running that's causing it. Finally, there's also the painful reformatting option and putting a fresh install of Vista on to see if it's just that.

Toefoo

Raere wrote: »

Run memtest.

Yea tried that after rebooting, reached 100% without errors and it still does it

I'll try the safemode later tonight, thanks KVW. I just wish HP had better tech support .

Scrublet

Memtest probably would have already flushed out these kind of problems, but try running Prime95 and see if you either fail, or get an earlier freeze.

theclam

Overheating, maybe? See if all the fans are blowing air properly.

Nakatomi2010

Overheating doesn't cause lock ups, they cause shut downs....

Try running the system in safe mode, if it continues to lock up I HIGHLY recommend running something like Ultmiate Boot CD for Windows... Why? The UBCDforW runs entirely out of RAM and does not touch the existing operating system, as such if it doesn't lock up then it's a software related issue, if it does lock up then its a hardware related issue

Alternatively you can use a Vista installatino disc, the preinstallation environment is essentially the same thing...

Ultimately doing a test like this narrows that aspect down....


Alternatively you've mentioned its an HP, you can go into the BIOS and should see an option labeled "Tools" or "Diagnostics" which has an HDD tester, run that and call me in the morning...

kingmetal

Check your Event Viewer! Vista has an awesome one and you'd be shocked at what ends up in there.

Click Start and right click on Computer, select Manage

Choose Event Viewer in the right hand column and see what's in there

Another great tool can be found in that same Computer Management dialog under Reliability and Performance --> Reliability Monitor

I like this even more, as it puts your errors and warnings on a timeline and makes everything a lot easier to read.

Also: overheating certainly causes lockups, I would absolutely pursue this as a strong possibility (my instincts tell me that is your issue, but be sure to check Event Viewer!).

Toefoo

Thanks guys. After running all of those tests (and noticing it didn't lockup in Safe Mode), I tried Event Viewer as kingmetal suggested and saw that Spybot was going apeshit. It makes sense in terms of the timeline, since I had just downloaded it maybe the day of or the day before I noticed this problem. So far its been back to normal, but I guess time will tell. Again, thanks everyone for your help!