Freezing

I have tried every thing to stop my windows7 home premium 32 bit freezing on my sony vaio laptop VGN-NS20Z to no avail. I tried various anti virus programs, installed Intel storage manager tried CHKDSK etc turned off firewall and other suggestions I found on the web. In the end in sheer desperation I booted into safe mode then typed msconfig into the programs search box on the bottom of the Start button menu. I then disabled all programs from Startup in the system configeration window then went to the services tab ticked the Hide all Microsoft Services then disabled every thing else, then re-booted. Fortunately to date it has stopped the freezing problem with no apparent adverse conditions. I now start my anti virus, firewall etc manually. Hope this might help someone at their wits end till they bring out a service pack to fix these problems.

Nick

Hey Nick!
Did you try updating drivers? That's often the cause of freezing. Try the graphic drivers first. I've had a look, and It doesn't look like configuration problem.
Also, have a look at other posts about freezing. Search "freezing" in the site search.

Hope this helps,
Fire Cat

Yes I did update all drivers using DriverMax and incidentally it found quite a few. Also done several clean installs after using dareks nuke and boot

Nick

Hey Nick,
I don't know what it could be, since you did multiple clean installs. Have you tried using Windows 7 64bit? It might be more capable of handling the computer.
By the way, during what kind of tasks does it freeze?

Fire Cat

I'm not sure whether my laptop supports the 64 bit version of windows as it origally came with Vista 32 bit and the documentation was rather scarce, any way I might start enabling the Startup Programs in Msconfig one at a time gradually to see if the freezing starts again. The tasks it freezes seemed to be all of them randomly
Nick

Ok, do that and post back the result.
Also,what is the configuration of your computer (Ram, hdd...) ?

Cheers,
Fire Cat

Hi FireCat my configuration is 4Gb ram 300Gb hard drive core2 duo T6400 processor. I did notice that this freezing problem never seemed to happen in safe mode even when the applications in system configuration were enabled. Browsing around the freezing seems to be more apparant on laptops than towers. As a matter of interest I've just installed 7 on my old Packard Bell Athlon 64 bit machine with none of these problems so I'm a bit baffled

Just a note - some of those driver update programs are not very good and can recommend drivers detrimental to your system. Many of the free versions also have ads on them to scan your system for viruses for free and can actually install malware viruses. Stick to driver scan software that is reliable and always make a restore point before installing any recommended changes.

I used this one and it seemed ok on my system:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/6655/...pdate-scanner/
I can't remember the first one I tried but it messed up my sound with one driver and several other updates it suggested would not even complete. Still others are just looking for money - ex: pay $29.95 for a lifetime membership to download blah blah blah.

According to the specs your core can handle 64-bit
http://ark.intel.com/product.aspx?id=40479

I like your idea of enabling the services one by one and after each boot determining if your system is still stable. Once it is no longer stable see if there is a 64-bit version of that last program, or contact their tech support for known problems and possible solutions.

What graphics card do you have? If it's NVidia do not allow any of the extras to load in the background especially the control panel.

Download a free copy of shexview and this will show you what context items are loading as well and allow you to disable them. I had a similar issue and after disabling various context menu items, my problem was resolved.