My Asus Z70Va is freezing...

It started freezing today, and I didn't realize that it was freezing until I got home from work. I set it to defrag and when it reached 17% the computer froze. Now when I boot it up it freezes, when I try to do pretty much anything it freezes, I have a small window of time that I can actually do anything on the computer before it is frozen again. I just got this thing and spent like 8 hours getting everything set up properly, am I going to have to do it again because of this problem? The hardware in the laptop is an intel 2.0ghz processor (533 fsb), 1 GB of ram, 80 gb harddrive with 16mb cache. Earlier today it was working well, I had to hardboot after a friend tried to see how well doom 3 would run on my machine with everything set to max. In one of my classes in the afternoon the harddrive started making noises, and I wasn't too sure why it was making the noises so I decided that maybe it needs a defrag. Does anyone know what could be causing the freezes? I am running Windows XP Pro SP2 on my machine.

 

Ew...strange hard drive noises are bad, as they usually indicate an impending failure. It's possible that you just got a bad drive. You might try running chkdsk from a dos prompt, but it's unlikely that you'll get any helpful information from it. Have you contacted your reseller?

 

What about the video drivers? Did you update the drivers recently? If not, I think most people have had the best luck with the omega drivers. Might want to try that. Now this is not going to fix any hd noise problems but its worth a shot towards the freezing problem. I noticed in another one of your posts that you talked about noises from day one with the hd. Are they the sam type of noises or have they gotten worse? Either way, noises other than clicking here and there are really not a good sign.

 

Hmm I tried uninstalling CHC and the freezing problem seems to have disappeared. Could it be that it was caused by some incompatability with that program that just randomly started occurring?

 

It could have been a bug in the program that didn't like something about your computer... software conflicts are quite common.
It sounded like more of a hardware problem though... perhaps overheating, too much undervolting, bad RAM, or dying hard drive.

Give it some more time...if it comes up again, my guess would be that it's a hardware problem.

Best of luck,
AuroraS

 

My desktop did this also, it kept freezing after about 20 min or so. I eventually found out that it was the hard drive. I used scan disk and it found some errors and corrected them however the drive still freezes and I had to get a new one. Maybe you could get hold of another notebook drive and test that?

 

Yes, hard drive noises are definitley bad...I regularly back up my data, just to be safe. I suggest that you back up all your data.

If you can, physically take out the hard drive and gently turn it over in your hands. If you hear noises, like something is moving up and down in there, then it sounds like your disk platters are moving around - very bad. Also, if you get 'tick tick' noises every once in a while, then there may be a problem with the read/write heads on the hard drive - also bad.

What kind of hard drive is it if I may ask?