Sony Vaio Laptop Froze, Wouldn't Turn Off

Hi! I'm not sure if this is the correct forum to post this, if it's not then i apologize and please move this thread to the correct forum, thank you!

Today while browsing the internet i was typing in a url when my Sony laptop completely froze on me. The keys, touchpad, etc wouldn't work. I tried Ctrlaltdelete, the power button. I tried closing my laptop (which usually turns it off) and didn't work either. I ended up having to pull out the battery in order to get it to turn off.

I was worried that that may have cause some damage to my laptop? Also, could there be a reason why my laptop froze like that? It was the first time that has happened before. I have downloaded some files earlier from save-file, but i have done that before and nothing like this has ever happened.

any advice on why it happened and how to prevent it will really helpful!

thank you!

 

If it happens again, try keeping the power button pressed for something like four seconds.

Unlikely.

I've seen this caused by broken/crappy drivers and overheating/dying hardware, but it's hard to diagnose with laptops since you can't just swap around components like you would with normal boxes. Just keep using the thing, make sure you have backups and don't worry too much about it unless it happens again/repeatedly...

 

As Nebelwand said, the way to force a hard shutdown is to press and hold down the power button for about 4 seconds.

It is possible that there might be some file corruption on the hard drive, so I would run chkdsk to see if it can find anything.

Lastly, again as Nebelwand said, a freeze-up like that is almost always caused by a badly written or corrupted driver - frequently two processes will end up in a deadlock situation where both have first dibs on the cpu's next cycles, but neither can get in before the other, which hangs the whole system, including the graphics, which is why the display freezes.

To see if you can find out what caused the hang, once you boot it up again, check your event logs for the time just before the freeze happened to see if anything got logged - check all of the log entries right before the event, even the ones that just say "information".

 

hi! thanks for the reply!

about checking the event logs, what exactly should i look for? i've never used them before so i'm a bit confused. I'm running vista by the way.