Been trying various tech sites, and links provided here on the website, but my head is spinning.
Me and Mrs. Anger bought a Sony Viao with Windows XP and have Verizon DSL on it.
After about a month and a half, the computer started freezing up after windows is on after an hour or so. I can navigate websites by typing in the address in the toolbar. But I can’t get to links or use the favorites bar, etc etc without shutting the computer off, then restarting, then it is all fine again. I also cannot access the Start menu, or use CTL+ALT+DEL to shut down whatever pop up ad or program that might be messed up.
Is it pop up ads? Is my computer crap?
I’ll answer any questions you might have; I’m not a computer expertr so someone might have to describe the problem as if I were a three year old.
“Freezing up” can be caused by hardware or software issues. XP is generally robust enough that hardware issue should be investigated first, and locking up after a time vs immediately generally points to heat related issues where a CPU fan, video card/chip fan, power supply fan or interior case airflow fan has failed. You can usually test this by direct observation of the system running without the case or side panel on, and see if all the fans are working.
However, in this case since your system is not hard crashing and the problem corrects after a reboot and only the IE behavior is glitching, you might first want to download spybot and adware, and scrub out any offending hangers on and see if that helps. Googling “download adaware” “download spybot” will take you to the DL links. A virus scan might not be a bad idea either.
Quite frankly if you don’t have an elaborate setup at this point, it might make sense to save your data and setup info for mail etc and re-intall the OS with the setup disks. That will tell you definitively if it is a hardware or software issue if the problem continues after re-install.
I agree completely with astro. It sounds like either spyware or a heat problem. After the computer has been running for a while, reboot and go into the BIOS setup. This usually means pressing DEL or F3 or some such key while the computer is booting. Look on the screen it will tell you the magic key or keys to press. There should be an option in there somewhere to look at the system temperatures. There will usually be two temperature sensors. One is located right under the CPU to measure its temperature. The other one is located elsewhere on the motherboard to monitor the overall case temperature. Anything over 45 deg C is bad news.
Also, as far as adware killers, I presently only trust Adaware and Spybot, and I’m a little leery of Spybot since it took out a couple of things that were actually needed by my computer (on the other hand, it also removed a nasty bit of spyware that Adaware missed). There are a lot of other so-called spyware/adware killers out there, but some of them are actually spyware in disguise so be careful.
Also take a look at the settings for hibernate. I’ve found that very few computers tolerate hibernation well. If I’m not off my rocker, it’s ON by default in XP HOME, and OFF in XP PRO.
right click desktop>properties>screen saver tab>power>hibbernate tab
uncheck Enable Hibernation.
bonus: it’ll free up some disk space.
don’t underestimate the above virus scanning/adware/crapware advice.
