Hard to tell without more detailed info (what does work? If anything?) But, let's say you have a bad area of your hard drive. Things will work fine until the computer tries to read or write something to it. Or maybe some of your files are just corrupted. Again, you're fine till it tries to use one of those files. Bad memory might cause symptoms like that too.. I had a bad memory card in a server once, but it wouldn't freeze up until there was enough stuff running to use a lot of memory and make it try to use the "bad" part.

i was thinking it might be the memory.....

i had an issue before when i tried to install a program...it came up with an error saying i needed at leat 196M of ram or some nominal amount....It came with 4G.

i looked, and it's 2 cards at 2 each...upgradeable to 8G with 2 4's.

I guess i'll try that before i get drastic.

Jesus Christ--stop him before he gets drastic!

Put down that soldering iron, man.

Before you buy memory, try the apps I pointed to here. If that checks out ok, do a surface check on the hard drive.

• Open the My Computer window.
• Right-click on the drive and choose properties.
• Click on the tools tab.
• Click on the error-checking/check now button.
• Click on both check boxes.
• Click on start.
• You may have to reboot.

Doing those things will at least give you more information.

thanks dar, i will attempt to. i dont think i'll be able to install those apps though.

The best memtest is this one anyway. That's an iso image. Download the file to a different computer. Use any of the methods on this page to burn the file to a cd. The cd will be bootable. Now boot your machine from the cd you made. You may have to run your machine's setup program to tell it to boot from cd. (When your machine first starts up, you should see a message "Press F2 (or something else) for setup." PM me if you have problems.

When the cd boots it will automatically start running the memtest.

I haven't used that particular program, but I agree that live-boot CDs are your friend. Big time.

cool. i have nero. thanks.

mmmmm

K

Y

???

What is the hardware manufacturer?

Remove the battery briefly?

I'm a little surprised. I was expecting you to tell him to break out his heat gun and direct the heat at various parts and report back what happens.

You can ruin a laptop with a hairdryer.

Especially if you are using it in the bathtub.

Why? We don't even know what the hardware manufacturer is? Fix the computer before doing a makover.