"Bob F" wrote in message
...
I've been trying to figure our what is causing an HP Vista laptop (dual
core AMD) to hang during operation. Sometimes it will work for hours,
sometimes barely minutes. The hangs usually shows when you try to do
something, and the cursor will show the "busy" rolling circle. It seems
like the harddisc will initially be cycleing continuously (LED flashing)
for a while, then finally it will just occasionally flash. The mouse still
moves, but you cannot start or close windows. When I've managed to have
the task manager running when it hangs, I've seen nothing unusual there,
but that eventually hangs also. Tasks that won't respond will in cases
show as "not responding", but trying to close them from the task manager
doesn't work. The system does not recover. I eventually have to power it
down, and then turn it on and run the windows disk check before I try
anything further. Speedfan shows to intense processing when the hang
occures.
I've run Memtest86+ and Seagate floppy based disk test without errors. The
full scan of the 250GB drive took about 2 full days to complete, which
seems really long to me, but it showed no errors.
This happened occasionally months ago and I thought I had it gone after
updateing windows, but is now occuring to the point that the computer is
pretty useless.
If anyone can suggest ideas for tracking this down, or sites than can help
with this process, I'd greatly appreciate it.
Windows Syatem page shows:
HP G60 Notebook
AMD Turion RM-70 2GZ
3GB Ram
Vista 32 bit
Windows Update says it is up-to-date.
Speedfan typically shows:
GPU 54C
Temp1 39
Temp2 39
Core 43
All I can tell you is right now there's a pc sitting on a desk here does
more or less same thing, e.g. just randomly locks up and nothing works, no
keyboard, mouse etc. One must pull plug to power it off and then it reboots
fine to sooner more than later do same thing again.
I'm basically positive it's the hard disk screwing up. Listening carefully
and one can hear it trying it's "retries". That led to a boot time full scan
which passed which led to using the hard disk manufacturers "SMART"
diagnostics utility whiched fails the drive fairly far along in the testing.
Unforetunately I don't have at hand another sata drive to throw in it and
test further without removing one already being used in another pc as a
slave. Time for a Linux live cd for a bit me thinks