Laptop freezes from time to time

Hi all,

I'm a new member on this forum, I used to visit the forum on a regular basis though. Now i have a problem myself, so I registered myself.

I recently bought a new laptop, a Packard Bell iPower GX.
It was quite a bargain, it seemed impossible to get a laptop with similar specs for the same price. It came with with Windows Vista 32 bit, while the laptop has 4GB of RAM installed . I planned to install a 64 bit OS later, but first I wanted to test if everything worked properly. I installed up-to-date drivers and removed the default crap included in Packard Bell's installation. First I ran some benchmarks (PCMark05, 3DMark06), everything seemed to work fine. I had no complaints about 3Dmark's results, after playing a bit with different drivers I got about 9k points. (C2D P7350, 4GB DDR3, 9800m GTS).

Then I started to use the laptop for regular things like surfing, watching movies etc. I installed a recent game to see if it ran smoothly, it did.
When I started to watch videos, (streams, DVD, Divx) I noticed that from time to time the sound starts to 'freeze' for like 1 second, and sometimes it leaded to a complete system freeze. The system cannot recover itself, the only thing I can do is rebooting. This seems to occur randomly, sometimes I can watch video's for 8 hours without having a complete freeze, (sound freezings seem to happen anyways from time to time, only it doesn't result always in a complete freeze) but it also can happen that the system completely freezes in like 15 minutes.

After a few days I installed Windows 7 64 bit, but unfortunately the problem still existed. At first I thought the VGA card was causing these troubles, so I ran some tests to check its stability.(I also tested different drivers) I used Furmark and it completed the stability test without problems. I also used a tool called 'Video Card Stability Test', I could pass that test without troubles as well. It seemed that the VGA card wasn't causing the troubles. After that i tested the RAM with Memtest86, also no errors were found.

I was wondering if any of you has a clue about what's causing these troubles, because at the moment I don't know what else I can do to resolve the problem.


Regards

 

Start > 'event viewer' > create a custom view that collects all the Critical and Error messages collected since the last time you had this freezing problem. Its great that you've been thorough, but perhaps Event Viewer can easily give us the answer. If not, we'll proceed the slow way.

 

Ah I forgot to mention that I already checked Event Viewer, nothing useful came out though.

 

Have you tried monitoring your temps? Use Hwmonitor.

The likely culprit could be the GPU, but without any errors or feedback from the OS its difficult to be certain. If this problem continues and persists with different operating systems, then you can be sure that you have a hardware problem on your hands.

 

Yes, I already monitored the temps as well. While running the stability test for the VGA card (Furmark), temps raise till about 90 degrees celsius max. These temps are a little high imo, but with normal usage temps won't rise that high. (also, Furmark is a stress test) These temps weren't causing troubles. I also monitored the temps while watching a video (when the problem occurs), it didn't pass 60 degrees so that's pretty ok.

About the CPU temps, idle temp is about 32 degrees (CPU isn't running at 2Ghz when idling though). Actually I didn't monitor the temps while running stress tests or benchmarks since I didn't have any problems with that so far. The temp while watching a video wasn't much higher than the idle temps.

In my opinion my temps are fine.

 

Sorry if I'm becoming repetitive here. Troubleshooting can be robotic and automatic at times.

You said it came with Vista 32-bit. Did this problem occur using this OS? I'm asking because I want to know if this problem persists across different operating systems. If it does, then you can be sure that you have a hardware problem.

 

hehe it's no problem I know troubleshooting can be a pain in the .

I'm afraid that it's a hardware problem then, since I had the problem on both Operating Systems i've tried so far

 

I don't know much about the brand, but I've heard some horror stories about older Packard Bell machines. Still this is likely the result of a defective component.

 

I also was kind off sceptical after all i've read about the brand, but it seems they improved their new products quite a lot. Also, Packard Bell became part of Acer and I never had any troubles with their products, so I decided to give it a try. Now i wish i didn't

 

Its not a common problem - and its not a case where you say "don't bother".

Yes, things like clogged fans are more likely to occur on a laptop - but that doesn't mean it can be ignored.

___________________________
to OP:

I hope you haven't been playing with services? And drivers - sometimes the manufacturer drivers are the best - even if they may be weaker.

Vista is a change from XP and is best not "tweaked" - I hope you didn't attempt any of that.

And you say videos freeze - You meantion streams - I assume Flash? Is it up to date? DVDs - shoudl work - and DivX - is it up to date?

The two - you may want to unistal them first, run CCleaner, reboot and install again - I had an oddly behaving soundcard because the driver was messed up, but nothing as extreme as you case.

 

The 90 C temps were on the video GPU or CPU?