Wiseacre
Retired USAF Chief
- Thread starter
- #21
Frozen computers can be anything really. However a common one is people installing two anti-virus programs... baddddddd idea.
I am actually having a similar problem with a laptop I am fixing. Now the guy who owns the laptop had installed two anti-virus which of course caused the freezing.
However there is still something wrong with the machine since the graphics card driver crashes also.. yes it is a sick puppy. Since the graphics card is a known problem child from Nvidia (old 9300 chip) then I suspect it is that... but... The machine has Windows 7 on it, which normally would not be a problem if it was not for the fact that the machine is an older Medion machine. Medion has a history of buying cheap ass parts (the thing has only 160 GB harddrive...) and not updating their drivers or telling people where to get new drivers.... which means no windows 7 drivers at all for this laptop model.. And since the machine came with a Vista installed with the correct drivers, then the whole problem set could simply be a driver issue of some sort.. we shall see.
Point I am trying to make is... the only way often you can figure out "freezing", "lagging" and so on issues, is by trial and error since it is in 9 out of 10 times 3rd party programs causing the problems... and good luck on figuring out which program. In fact I have had a machine (in the 1990s) freeze and do BSODs because of a faulty CD drive... but did it tell me that it was that? of course not.
This is the check list I normally follow on "freezing", lagging and BSOD. After each check, see if the problem has gone away.
1. Check for double anti-virus.
1a. Check which kind of anti-virus... Norton and McAfee can be problematic and should be removed as a test at some point. It can also simply be that the anti-virus is too aggressive in its scanning.
1b. Make sure the anti-virus is not fake.. googling the name often provides enough information to make that assessment if you are unsure.
2. Check for iTunes... can really screw up a system... remove
3. Check for "free bars".. google, yahoo and so on and remove
4. Check for Ashampoo programs.. remove.. or in general other suspect free programs.. they usually also install some sort of "cool" bar in your browser
5. Run Malwarebytes (Mallwarebytes.com) for malware, spyware, crapware.
6. Update drivers.
7. CTR ALT DEL and get into task manager and see what is using a lot of memory and/or CPU power.
8. Memory scan (Windows 7 has such a program else there are a few on the net).
If nothing of this works.. then reinstall since you have wasted enough time. If the problem is still there after reinstall and before you start installing anything, then you know it is a hardware problem.
The desktop is about 1 year old, came with Win7 installed and has Webroot AV with Spy Sweeper. There's no other AV program, not a lot of other stuff added.
So, I took it back to Best Buy, the Geek Squad said there was no hardware problem, had to be software. I uninstalled everything that wasn't there originally, did a disk cleanup and defrag, every mx thing I could find. So far, no freeze. We'll see what happens.