Windows Vista laptop, keeps crashing.

[chrissib]

Hi People,

is there any way I can monitor or test why my laptop keeps crashing. It is quite old in today's ever advancing technology but still current in a lot of ways.

specifics
Windows Vista
intel celeron C900

I have looked for administrative tools in control panel, loads of events but too many to sift through without knowing where to look.
In running processes, I have several 'svchost's running and recently followed a procedure off the internet to reduce the effect of these taking up all the processing power. Was consistently running at 100% before this.
I have run a memory test within Windows, and this showed no failures. I have a virus protection program running which has detected no viruses.

The problem seems to occur when running videos mainly, and the casing gets quite hot. I have cleaned the vents since. I dont know if things are related but programs take ages to change. For example, coming off of screensaver, can take up to 3 minutes. Loading a page on some web sites, can take similar times although I have Fibre broadband, and plenty of bandwidth. Normally when this happens, I see either 'resolving host' or 'waiting for cache' in the left hand bottom corner of the screen.

Any ideas greatly appreciated.
Chris

 

[SpyderTracks]

I would download malwarebytes and run a full system scan to start with.

To be honest though, the first thing I'd do would be to do a full format and install any os apart from vista, it's shockingly terrible, both for security and bugs. In essence it was abandoned before it was finished and causes more problems than it solves.

 

[ubuysa]

Take a look at your hard disk, from what you describe I'll bet that's where your problems lie. How full is it? Get hold of Ccleaner from http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner and run the disk cleaner (and only that - do NOT run the registry cleaner). After that if it's still more than about 80% full you should look to move some little used data off there onto an external drive. Then run the Windows defragger. That will improve things but you may need to run an optimising defragger to place the regularly used data and the MFT close to the outer tracks and the little used data close to the inner tracks. You can also achieve the same effect (proper file placement) by reinstalling Vista.

 

[chrissib]

ok thanks for the replies...

I dont have a good copy of another Windows OS to use so moving away from the OS on the PC would be awkward.

I have over 75% free of the internal 250GB hard disk and also have a USB attached 2TB drive with barely a scratch on the surface of this used.

I dont think space is an issue, but I did wonder about virtual memory at one stage. Now though thinking more of processing power, as these running processes still seem to eat CPU power some of the time. And the fact that most crashes happen when playing videos, or streaming.

 

[ubuysa]

ok thanks for the replies...

I dont have a good copy of another Windows OS to use so moving away from the OS on the PC would be awkward.

I have over 75% free of the internal 250GB hard disk and also have a USB attached 2TB drive with barely a scratch on the surface of this used.

I dont think space is an issue, but I did wonder about virtual memory at one stage. Now though thinking more of processing power, as these running processes still seem to eat CPU power some of the time. And the fact that most crashes happen when playing videos, or streaming.

So your HDD is not overly full, which is good. We can't let the HDD off the hook just yet though, the overwhelming majority of performance issues of the type you describe are HDD related so we need to be sure it's not the HDD before we move on to something else. Msot processes use the HDD at some point or other and any problems there tend to get magnified by the number of I/Os being done to the disk.

Before we look at the HDD in more detail I strongly suggest you back up your user data at least. If you can take an image of the disk (Macrium Reflect free from http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx is an excellent tool for doing that). Always remember that "you pack your own parachute"!

Now open a command prompt and enter the command "chkdsk /r" (but without the quotes). This will check the filesystem on the disk for integrity and (because of the /r switch) it will check for bad sectors on the disk and attempt to recover them (that's why a backup first is important). If any errors are found that could not be corrected you're probably looking at a new HDD.

Once chkdsk has run (and corrected any disk errors) download Ccleaner from http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner. Run the disk cleaner and allow it to clean everything it finds. Do not run the registry cleaner (don't run any registry cleaners).

Now run the Windows defrag on the disk. Once that's completed reboot.

If you're still having problemsthen it's now probably not the HDD and we can move on to something else....