Acer TravelMate 2480 Laptops Freezing... Why?

Hello and thanks for reading. I am part of a large research study and we have about 150 Acer TravelMate 2480 laptops. We stick these laptops behind or under furniture, out of the way, and leave them there untouched. They have a couple programs running to collect data and that is all. We only connect to them remotely occasionally if something seems wrong with the data collection from a house. By the way, they are connected wirelessly to routers we put in as well.

Anyway, the problem with these laptops is that we have had quite a few hang/freeze inexplicably. When they hang, the data collection programs stop and it becomes remotely inaccessible. After hard booting them off and restarting them they sometimes only show a black/blank screen, but otherwise act like they are started up just fine. Other times after hard booting them off and restarting them they act normal showing all screens during startup. The windows event logs show no errors or indicators of commonality between the crashes. All drivers are up to date. We are running Windows XP on them.

If you have any ideas, please help. Thanks again.

 

have u tried to see if the hard drive is bad

 

The hard drive is still good and we run memtest on bad laptops we bring in from the field. Most all the memtests have come back fine.