Windows 7 freezes ALOT

[Misfit]

I am having big problems with my Acer Aspire 7551.
Specs:
AMD Phenom II N970 / 2.2 GHz (Quad-Core)
4 GB RAM
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Edition
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250
300 GB HDD

I've had the computer for 2 1/2 years now, never did a restore before. So last week it froze HARD, after a few failed attempts to boot it all went to heck. I ended up using a Toshiba repair disk to get to a cmd prompt and format the drive, then used Alt+F10 on boot to get the restore parttion to boot.

I installed windows and went through removing programs I don't want/need and shutting down services. So I have a fresh Win 7 install, but it CONSTANTLY freezes. I am using IE for now and every time I open a page it freezes for a few mins. Alot of the times it will freeze for 10 mins and at that point I just power down. I have had to power down at least 15 times in the last 2 days. I tried running windows update thinking maybe that would fix something, but it just searches for updates forever. The amount of freezing has made my computer all but unusable.

I joined here because many times I have gotten help from old posts I find and the user base seems like a helpful and informed bunch.

Forgot to mention, anytime a window freezes I cannot open Task Manager. Sometimes I can get to it by right clicking the task bar, but after selecting Task Manager nothing. I try Ctrl + Alt + Del, and select tskmngr, it goes back to desktop but never opens. On the VERY rare occasion I can get it to open but it just freezes and greys out with (Not Responding) in the title bar.

 

[TrainableMan]

Unfortunately freezing can be very complicated because it can be caused by so many things.

If your system is freezing after a fresh install then I would suspect hardware problems, however first I would rule out that you didn't reinstall a virus. Test for viruses in safe mode as explained HERE.

Next you might check your hard drive for issues. Maybe with Passmark DiskCheckup.

And it is a very good idea to install the latest Acer drivers and BIOS for your computer as these are known to cause BSODs or freezing. You did not mention whether you had 64 or 32-bit so be sure to get the drivers right for your OS install.

You could even test your RAM with Memtest86+, though I doubt it because RAM going bad after a couple years is rare.