What would cause my Vaio to freeze and totally lock up ?

I was using my laptop this afternoon when everything totally froze and locked up, all i had open at the time was a bbc sports web page. I first noticed something wasn`t right when my mouse wouldn`t move the cursor, its a wireless mouse so i checked the USB dongle and the green light was not dispalyed so i thought maybe the batteries had run out.

I thought never mind i`ll use my touch pad for now and sort that out later, my touch pad is always enabled and that wasn`t working either. I thought Hmmmm, i then tried my disc drive to see if that would open so i clicked the button for it to open and nothing at all, the caps lock wasn`t working either as that usually has a green LED on and again nothing, basically the whole screen was froze on the web page i was viewing and none of the functions were working on my laptop as i tried numerous keys like escape and all the F keys and windows symbol etc but nothing worked.

I basically had to turn the power off which i wasn`t keen on doing for obvious reasons, that was my last resort so to speak. I powered it back up and got the usual option after you have turned the power off and not shut down proper asking me which mode i wanted to start windows in, safe or normal etc. I powered it up in normal mode and here i am again back to normal with it seems everything working as it should do. Any ideas what happened to cause this, my laptop is only about a month old and it runs windows vista ultimate 32 bit, its a sony vaio VGN-AR51SU.

Could the operating system cause that or is its a hardware issue ?

 

Yes, it could be either of those things. Did you try Ctrl-Alt-Del? For this type of total lock up without a BSOD, I would look towards a driver issue based on experience/hunch. Without further instances of the problem, it's difficult to tell, to be honest.

 

Hi, i`m not an expert when it comes to this sort of thing so i didn`t know that CTRL-ALT-DEL was something i could try, basically the whole screen was locked onto a web page which was just a bbc sport website, nothing on my laptop would work like opening the dvd drive, mute buttons,caps lock or anything at all. The whole system was froze, i had to power it off at the power on/off button and everything seemed fine when it re-booted.

As i say, i`m no expert when it comes to this sort of thing hence asking for a bit of help and advice, to give you a picture of my OS last week i did a fresh install of my opertaing system from the recvovery discs i made via the vaio recovery centre and its been fine generally apart from this freeze yesterday, the SP1 update only came through last night and ive now done all the vaio updates as i was waiting for SP1 to come down first before installing them.

I guess only time will tell if this is a major issue or not, hopefully all those updates may have cured a bug in the system.

 

Were you able to move/see your mouse during the time that your computer froze up or was the mouse completely frozen as well? If you could still move your mouse and clicking around resulted in parts of your browser turning white and generally being unresponsive, then it could just be a software problem with your browser or with an errant script on the website you were visiting.

 

I couldn`t see my cursor or move my mouse, everything was totally locked up. My touchpad is always enabled and i couldn`t even use that as that didn`t work either, my dvd drive wouldn`t open from the button to open it, caps lock wouln`t light up the LED to say its enabled, nothing would work at all apart from the power on off button as thats how i had to shut it down.

 

Something possibly "overloaded" the computer - RAM or CPU - that's one of the occassions where my old Medion froze up.

I know Firefox only the software has stopped working correctly with the BBC iplayer.

Have you been running except the internet browser?
Virus scan maybe??
Have you scanned for viruses?

Worst case:
OS messed up - but I doubt it...

 

Yeah, I've noticed that too and it's pretty annoying. If you start the Download Manager first, then it works OK... it's just that 50% of the time, if you just click Download it will prompt you to install the Download Manager again.

 

Well, even without download...just playing...it crashes...

 

its possible the SP1 update from night before is the culprit, perhaps an incompatability with a driver? its so hard to say when these things happen.
i have an old pc which freezes up a lot and its an issue with the network card, the driver for the old card doesn't like being networked with vista so it keeps freezing.



nb: when my old pc freezes cntrl/alt/del doesn't work on it as nothing is recognised

 

Aha... I've never tried playing the streaming video so didn't know that. I just download them to watch whenever.

 

I only stream them... downloading with DRM is of ittle use to me...

Anway:
Any update on he "crash issue Mr Stig?

 

There are tools out there to remove that problem. I have to strip the DRM because I like to stream the programmes to my Xbox360 to watch on a bigger screen in the living room.

 

But I think that would be illegal...
I've gota download of David Gilmore in Gdansk... can't play it anymore due to DRM... but lets not go into that - I suspect its against forum rules.