Major Problem with Windows 7.

Okay this post will be a bit long so bear with me.
Last night i did a clean install of windows 7 ultimate 64 bit, again. This was because in my last installation my microsoft office had somehow become corrupt and i spent nearly a day trying to fix the registry getting nowhere, and system restores weren't working either. So i just did a clean install.

Anyway, i had backed everything i needed on my external. Now everything was fine until today.
Here is the problem. Randomly, windows 7 will pretty much lag out and freeze on me, my hard disk light will show alot of activity but after i manage to open task manager (it takes a full minute to do so), no processes are running that are eating up my memory or cpu. This happened today when i woke my computer up from hibernate and sleep, so i thought it had something to do with turning it on at first, but now it happened randomly. I had also installed some custom themes but i dont think it has anything to do with that, and it seems that it might have started after installing the synaptics touchpad driver. I did a system restore but I'm not sure if that fixed it.

Also this NEVER happened in my previous installation.

 

I'm wondering if your hard drive is going to fail soon. Might be why your Office became corrupt. Windows 7 doesn't just randomly freeze, and certainly not because of a touchpad driver.

Try doing the earliest system restore you can, and make sure the synaptics driver is gone. Also, uninstall those custom themes, they could be incompatible and causing Windows to throw up.

That's all I can think of.

 

I was also thinking that it might be my hard drive. I need the synaptics driver though, otherwise for some reason i can't use scroll on my touchpad. I switched back to the regular windows theme and did a system restore to last nights windows update installation.
I don't know what else might cause this. Also about the microsoft office thing, i think that was my fault, lol. In my last installation i had installed about 10 different themes to try out, then my microsoft office icons changed to unknown icons, and thats when the entire happened of me trying to fix it, in the end it just made it worse.

 

+1 for hard drive failure, that sounds like pretty typical symptoms. If you have everything backed up already keep it! If not, do so asap, just in case.

-1 on custom themes unless he's using something like windows blinds I can't see that being the root of the problem. You might be right but I have doubts.

 

But can it really be my hard drive
I mean this laptop is only about 18 months old, and the hard drive should be 18 months as well since i started using it, don;t average hard drives last much longer than that?

Anyway i better get a backup plan going just in case.
Also, is it possible to install windows 7 on my external (as a bootable drive) with all my stuff on it already?

 

I don't believe you can install an OS on an external hard drive. Computer parts can fail at any time unfortunately.

@Spooky: I know Windows Blinds can really mess things up sometimes, it sure did with my XP. I don't know if it's gotten better or not.

 

Sigh, it just happened again. But i don't know why, it never happened in the previous install of windows 7 i had (which was there until last night). I did another restore and decided not to reinstall the synaptics driver for a while to see if it happens again.

 

Good idea. But if it happens again, reinstall Windows 7 and see if it continues. If it does, you know the hard drive is failing.

 

The next time you screw up your icons, you can just make a new user profile, rather than wiping your partition.

 

LOl^^ Im a noob at computers. D:

Anyway could it also be because that i download the synaptics driver from their website and not my manufacturer? I just read on their website that i should have downloaded it from Toshibas website instead, maybe incompatibilities there?

 

It doesn't matter where you download the driver. That's not what's causing your problems.

 

What laptop model is this and how old is this thing?

Harddrive failures are kind of rare for an 18 month old.

 

Toshiba Satellite A300
My hard drive shows up as

TOSHIBA MK3252GSX ATA Device

Under devices and printers
I really hope this isn't a hard drive problem but something else, as i said, this never happened on my previous win 7 installation i had for a while but this one i had for a day and i already have problems.

I also opened up the hard drive cover to see if anything was loose, everything is good down there.

 

It does matter where you download the drivers from.

Notebooks can be and usually are customized by specific firmware for seemingly 'generic' hardware. The software/drivers from the manufacturer is tuned to this custom firmware and works optimally with it.

Good luck.

 

I thought that as long as the driver version was the same, it didn't matter where he got it from. If it's been altered, the version is changed. Although it's probably a good idea to download it from an official source anyway.

 

Even if the driver version name/number happened to be the same, I would still be hesitant to run it on a brand name notebook and expect it to run without issues.

Like I mentioned, not only do manufacturers take liberties with the firmware, but also with the software/drivers too with the hardware that goes into their systems.

 

I dunno, I've downloaded dozens of drivers from multiple places and never had a problem, or even heard of this firmware issue your talking about. I'm not saying you're wrong, just maybe that I don't understand.

 

Hey guys, i was looking through event logs, and it seems that around the time this issue happens, event logs something like this in system errors.
Some of them are different errors, but this is the most common one i see.

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort2.

Any ideas? Searching this on google also took me to other forums where people who were using vista experienced a similar problem, but i cant find a fix for windows 7.

 

Do you have an external drive connected to the computer?

 

Yes i do, but i don't have it connected all the time. This happened once while i was in class taking notes and i left the external at home, so its not the external i don't think

 

Make sure you disconnect all external devices and see if it happens again. I'm really hoping it's not a problem with your laptop, like a loose cable or something with the mobo/hard drive.

 

It has happened with no devices plugged in, some people have said updating the bios/chipset drivers might fix it so i'll try that out now.

Edit: Also my external is less than a month old, although i would rather it be a problem with my external, i highly doubt it. =[

Another thing i forgot to add (the site wont let me edit the above post again for some reason)

Could the IDE error also be in reference to virtual drives? I had daemon tools running. Also some other fixes have said to delete the ATA drive 0 (2x) and ATA drive 1 (2x) from the device manager and reboot, which should fix the problem.

Could this also be a bad SATA controller on my motherboard?

 

Daemon tools don't configure their virtual mount drive as IDE AFAIK.

 

I don't know what IDE means, lol. I was just hoping it was Daemon tools. Also my optical drive doesn't work anymore (and it hasn't since a month or so), never really bothered to get it fixed. Not sure if thats IDE or not but what else are we looking at?