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Computer frreezes without warning. Need input


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For the past two to three months I have been experiencing a sudden freeze of the mouse on the computer meaning that is it is completely unworkable until I either re-start.

It seems that the only way to get out of it is to re-set the computer. This means of course that the F Secure anti-virus software I have installed with the Shaw Cable Internet connection immediately starts to run to scan everything in sight in order to comply with its restart protocols. This can take up to 4-5 minutes during which I am unable to do anything.

I supppose I could try unloading the F Secure pogramme from the icon in the system tray as soon as the computer re-starts but my main issue and point is that the freezing is getting far too frequent for comfort and I can't figure out why this is happening. I have tried unloading F Secure,except for the firewall, yesterday but this had no effect-- I was downloading a back-up programme from the internet and the computer stopped he download in its tracks. In all I tried 4 times to save this large 30 minute download but each time the computer froze up and I lost it completely.

It can happen at any time for no obvious reason with no other programmes running other then the one I happen to be accessing at the time. At any other time in my past when I have experienced this problem the cause has always been an anti-virus application running in the background at the same time and taking up a huge amount of CPU which crashed the computer. Trend Micro being a case in point.

However, as I have mentioned above, turning off F. Secure did not have any effect on the situation which still occurred.

Hoping that someone can suggest a sequence of diagnostic events that can detect the problem. Or ANY suggestions would be welcome?

Someone did suggest that it could be the hardware but my computer is only 4 1/2 years old and I put in another RAM stick a few months ago to add to the resource. Could it be the original RAM stick now beginning to fail? Is that at all likely? If not, that leaves only the motherboard and the hard-drive does it not?

Thanks

Scarlet.

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Wot no:

Replies.

Interest.

Advice.

Body at home.

Desire to help a helpless older codger with minimal computer skills.

Compassion.

:oops: I feel so lonely. LOL

Charles or Caley Mad in Berks or Wanderer or..............

Do you remember WOT NO, the little guy whose large nose was looped over the wall and all you could see were his curled fingers on the top of the wall and the top of his head. He was really cute huh ? And asked some very cute questions too?

O.K. Have a nice day you-all.Back to the Bayou. :wave:

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At 4 1/2 years old (ancient in computer years) you could easily end up spending more on it than it is worth and you may never solve the problem...heck you may even end up spending more than a new one would cost.

In my experience unexpected freezes like this are a sign of a hardware issue, but without any obvious cause and it happening randomly you could spend forever swapping and changing bits, updating drivers etc and might never get to the bottom of it.

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I had just finished posting a message here and the computer froze again. Lost it all so went back to square one.

All advice noted with thanks.

The laptop sounds good Wanderer. However , with fading eyesight I need 800 X 600 for the desktop so will have to take a hard look around. That could be a problem I know.

Built-in obsolescence? --sound incredible that you can't even get 10 years out of it. I must have been lucky with my NEC monitor which I have had since 2002 and nary a tremble.

Caley D --your common sense appeals to me and of course your thoughts had also crossed my mind in trying to determine whether to repair or buy another. The latter is looking more and more appealing by the minute.

I had better post this before I lose it.

Thnks again fellas. Appreciated.

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  • 1 month later...

I had just finished posting a message here and the computer froze again. Lost it all so went back to square one.

All advice noted with thanks.

The laptop sounds good Wanderer. However , with fading eyesight I need 800 X 600 for the desktop so will have to take a hard look around. That could be a problem I know.

Built-in obsolescence? --sound incredible that you can't even get 10 years out of it. I must have been lucky with my NEC monitor which I have had since 2002 and nary a tremble.

Caley D --your common sense appeals to me and of course your thoughts had also crossed my mind in trying to determine whether to repair or buy another. The latter is looking more and more appealing by the minute.

I had better post this before I lose it.

Thnks again fellas. Appreciated.

Why dont you try typing your problem into you tube, I saw a similar problem where they located a dodgy driver installed, checked the driver name on the internet

to confirm it was dodgy and then removed it. will need another pc to get online to check.

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Thank you 12th Man. I have already purchased a new computer, installed Windows 7 and Word 2010.

Problems already, although not of the freezing variety.

Seems to be slow to boot up although hardly anything is running in the start-up menus apart from the Computer Management stuff.The new computer is much more powerful than the previous one so ...go figure.

Internet Explorer 9 is also slow to get web pages to come up.Click until you drop seems to be required here. An example is accessing this webpage today. Refused to come up at all and I don't remember the ad on the top left of the site being so persistent...at least it has changed from Vista Print who only offered me 65 pop-ups per minute, one after the other in quick succession. Vista Print offers excellent quality business cards dirt cheap, including very prompt delivery, which I useto great advantage when I was in business but .. When I first accessed this site and set Tools,POPUPS,to deny all popups I was absolutely deluged with popups one after the other with all the text on the page being obscured. Now, at that time, I think that these advertisements had detected a new system and got in the door before the popup control got a handle on it.Fortunately they have all disappeared bar one .

Windows Live email will not allow you to send a page; either the page itself or the link. It does offer "Send page by Windows Live email " but this only sends you to the Hotmail sign up page and nowhere else. If I switch to hotmail then my scads of addresses will all have to be changed to hotmail I assume -- and that is not going to happen.

My beef is simple...with Outlook Express everything was smooth and simple; no problems and using it I had NO texting issues when composing an email for onward transmission.W. Live Mail offers you so may options that you need a manual to understand the site. Smile.

Although XP has been stated by "experts" to be verfy stable yet they have to change the operating system to Windows 7. This way they can gouge another $100 out of you to buy the new Outlook and $125 if you have it installed as I did when the guys built my computer. Incredible, since they announce that they have sold 185,000 Windows 7 sets, which amounts to over two thousand, million dollars folks! When is enough not enough? Answer...simple. NEVER.

Now, with Windows Live email, the moment I press enter after inserting the cursor between a couple of letters, half the paragraph disappears without a rational reason.... and so on.

If this Windows 7, as compared to the stable XP, is progress then you will have to tell me where it is. It's change for the sake of change it seems.Windows 8 is about ready for launch too I read-- Oh! I can't wait, my knees are trembling.

Does anyone know whether the text typing programme in Windows Live Mail is, by any chance, the 2010 Word programme that I installed on the computer or is it a stand-alone word processing programme that Microsoft has attached to this Windows Live email thing? Please tell me it is the latter .

:shrug:

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Refused to come up at all and I don't remember the ad on the top left of the site being so persistent...at least it has changed from Vista Print who only offered me 65 pop-ups per minute, one after the other in quick succession. Vista Print offers excellent quality business cards dirt cheap, including very prompt delivery, which I useto great advantage when I was in business but .. When I first accessed this site and set Tools,POPUPS,to deny all popups I was absolutely deluged with popups one after the other with all the text on the page being obscured. Now, at that time, I think that these advertisements had detected a new system and got in the door before the popup control got a handle on it.Fortunately they have all disappeared bar one .

If you are getting popups I can GUARANTEE you it is not us. We do not have popups, we do not like popups and we will not entertain them. Our google ads are very basic ... on the main forum pages such as topics we add them at top and bottom only and these are centred on the page. YOU have to click on them to be taken to the advertiser. On other pages, such as those with a sidebar, we may add small square ones to the side and that is basically it.

If you are getting popups I would suggest checking IE "Manage Add Ins" for rogue add-ins and also do a spyware/adware scan immediately.

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Windows Live email will not allow you to send a page; either the page itself or the link. It does offer "Send page by Windows Live email " but this only sends you to the Hotmail sign up page and nowhere else. If I switch to hotmail then my scads of addresses will all have to be changed to hotmail I assume -- and that is not going to happen. My beef is simple...with Outlook Express everything was smooth and simple; no problems and using it I had NO texting issues when composing an email for onward transmission.W. Live Mail offers you so may options that you need a manual to understand the site. Smile.

Although XP has been stated by "experts" to be verfy stable yet they have to change the operating system to Windows 7. This way they can gouge another $100 out of you to buy the new Outlook and $125 if you have it installed as I did when the guys built my computer. Incredible, since they announce that they have sold 185,000 Windows 7 sets, which amounts to over two thousand, million dollars folks! When is enough not enough? Answer...simple. NEVER.

Now, with Windows Live email, the moment I press enter after inserting the cursor between a couple of letters, half the paragraph disappears without a rational reason.... and so on. If this Windows 7, as compared to the stable XP, is progress then you will have to tell me where it is. It's change for the sake of change it seems.

Windows 8 is about ready for launch too I read-- Oh! I can't wait, my knees are trembling. Does anyone know whether the text typing programme in Windows Live Mail is, by any chance, the 2010 Word programme that I installed on the computer or is it a stand-alone word processing programme that Microsoft has attached to this Windows Live email thing? Please tell me it is the latter .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Mail

I dont use it and dont have W7 on this machine but if its like Outlook Express it could be either. OE had an inbuilt editor but you could also set it to use Word if you had that installed ..... Personally, I would say that if you have Outlook supplied as part of your Office2010 package, use that and ignore/disable/remove Windows Live Mail

http://www.sevenforums.com/browsers-mail/48677-how-uninstall-windows-live-mail.html

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Scotty

Wow! Comprehensive examinatuion and suggestions. I have gone through all the links and spent time reading everything.

I have temporarily disabled grapghics acceleration and initiated software rendering, Seems to have worked, No more Vista Print pop-ups. The symptoms seen by other posters on these forums mirror exactly what I saw.The shimmering, repetitive pop-ups etc.

Now your" time run-down for the start of the next season' display is showing in full mode at the bottom right whereas formerly it was showing in a very small thingy on the top left.

Adobe is talking extensively about working on a fix for the Flash 10.3 bug which appears to be causing all this mayhem. They have asked for trialists for the beta fix and meanwhile have disabled the auto update function.

Meantime,I considered their suggestion of updating the Graphics driver butmy syustem msays I am running the best driver and when I went to Intel they said that any OEM installed driver may have been different from their Intel one and if you are still in warranty , as I am , not to risk screwing up the OEM installed driver which may have been "worked" to suit your system. Oh My--what a tangled web weave others to deceive.

Windows Live Mail is a combination of Outlook Express from XP and Windows Mail which was running on Vista apparently.Some hybrid.

I am now thinking that it is my new keyboard that is causing all the lost text problems because it is happening on here right now also as I am trying to complete this post.

Thank you to all the guys who contributed to this thread and all it's subsequent explorations into unknown territory. I cannot believe that such experienced operators as Adobe can allow such a c..ck up in their10.3 flash update --they are recommending that we do not download this update until further notice.

By the way, The version of M/S Office 2010 that I purchased does not include "Outlook" nor do I know if Word 2010 is defective or not. The latter i installed separately.So I need to just thole it until i can find the root cause . Looks like it's back to the flipping retailer again to ask for another keyboard. Can't surely be the mouse --he is asleep beside me right now so I will just let sleeping mice lie..eh?

Scotty you are a gem and a fount of knowledge and great suggestions. I will update as time goes along on this issue.. Many thanks !

Scarlet :thumbup:

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Final Update on the Adobe issue:

Adobe have feverishly been working on the problems with errant advertising messages (popups) appearing on the top left hand side of webpages.

They have found the cause of the problem and issued a fix namely Adobe Flash player Active X 10 : 3 : 181 :16 which is the latest and most up to date Flash Player.

I downloaded it after getting rid of the previous version by uninstalling it then downloaded the new update,

I also followed their instructions to re-enable the accerated hardware thingy returning mny suystem to the original default position.

The results are excellent--no pop-ups ads on the ICT site, the ICT video page is fast and working great with no problems and my browser (I.E. 9) is working much faster.

In view of the number of posters to the Adobe forum that have experienced the problems associated with this bug I am surprised that more ICT members have not mentioned that they also have been troubled by it.

I had a problem also with Adobe several months ago, last year I think, and it was only by a process of elimniation that I found that it was their Adobe active X that was causi ng it. Then I unisnstalled the running version and downloaded an updated version and this made a huge difference inthe running of my computer,

But can anyone tell me why the Adobe Flash Player 10 active X is not showing in ..Tools , Manage Add-Ons despite the fact that it shows as an installed programme. Does it matter if it works? I alwyas saw it in there before.

Scotty?

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if it works, dont worry about it !

as for the Flash issue - I believe its an IE9/Flash issue rather than all browsers so not a huge amount of users migrated to IE9 yet !

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Good thinking, Scotty.

Adobe's tech also says online that it only happens with computers running Intel HD Graphics which, unfortunately is what was installed in my new computer. All's well that ends well, thank goodness.

I supppose getting used to the new IE9 browser is part of the frustration of meeting and grappling with all the changes all at once. Alright?

In retrospect it is probably a good browser and has some good features.

Chrome is twice as fast but it sure has elemental flaws --importing favourites, for example. With some users of Chrome their import function seems to work flawlewssly but with others. like me, not al all. I gave up eventually since their forum's posters mostly just repeat Chrome's instructions which..... :frustrated01:

I remain a devotee of the mantra .."if it aint broke, don't fix it."

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  • 3 weeks later...

All problems with my new computer seem to have been resolved with the exception of Windows Live Mail which remains a bugbear .e.g.already-typed-text disappears at the drop of a hat when typing and without any warning. This has to be a bug because I have never experienced such a thing before with Outlook Express.

I looked at G.Mail as an alternative,but was very surprised to note the complexity of it as well as the problems that users have sent in to Google and the number of problems they have had to work on and fix.

All I want is a very simple send and receive function and being able to email a weppage and/or an attachment.That's it?

Anybody got any suggestions?..Yahoo maybe? What about Hotmail ..any good and stable?

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you are with Shaw Cable yes ? Do they have webmail ? Why not try that instead of a mail program.

I tend to not bother using Outlook any more (and never used Outlook Express) purely because my Rogers email is now just as good if not better than Outlook and there is no limit on stored emails.

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Yes, Shaw Cable does have WEBMAIL and I have talked to a technician about a switch to them some weeks ago.

However, their "import contacts" button apears on their webpage but the tech told me that it is not functional..... yet?...ever? Go figure. :ponder:

He also tells me that their webmail cannot send an attachment which seems very odd and all you can do is send an email with text pasted into the body of it by copying from another document, presumably in the format which comes up when you click on "send a message."

Rogers does not exist in Western Canada --only Shaw and Telus.Shaw took over Rogers several years ago--at that time I was with Rogers for TV only and can't remember any particular issues with them. We do not have much in the way of competition in Canada do we?

I think I should 'phone Shaw again and try to clarify these statements because they do seem odd.

Scotty, have you used Hotmail or Yahoo at all?

The Outlook to which you refer must be the new product offered by Microsoft as a substitute for Outlook Express.I know very little about it but their $100 charge for the product was enough for me to abstain from finding out anything..smile.

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Another issue I have is with IE9--it stops working frequently and I always get an error message which says that "M/S will now try to find the problem" then something runs abut nothing else happens--no magic cure, like. I can usually get out of it without restarting the computer so it is an irritant. Is this IE9 a BETA operation by any chance. Never saw that wenywhere?

Another programme that I used to run on my old computer without any hangups or problems was Microsoft Fix It. I think it comes already installed on Windows 7 and I have had several uninstall or install and won't run. Trying to find the reason why it is so hopeless I just happened to notice that fearsome word in tiny red ink beside the name when it displayed on the heading of the web page--- viz."BETA" .Then I got rid of it pronto by using the Windows Installer/Uninstaller. Microsoft--what next !!???

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Yes, Shaw Cable does have WEBMAIL and I have talked to a technician about a switch to them some weeks ago.

However, their "import contacts" button apears on their webpage but the tech told me that it is not functional..... yet?...ever? Go figure. :ponder:

He also tells me that their webmail cannot send an attachment which seems very odd and all you can do is send an email with text pasted into the body of it by copying from another document, presumably in the format which comes up when you click on "send a message."

Rogers does not exist in Western Canada --only Shaw and Telus.Shaw took over Rogers several years ago--at that time I was with Rogers for TV only and can't remember any particular issues with them. We do not have much in the way of competition in Canada do we?

I think I should 'phone Shaw again and try to clarify these statements because they do seem odd.

Scotty, have you used Hotmail or Yahoo at all?

The Outlook to which you refer must be the new product offered by Microsoft as a substitute for Outlook Express.I know very little about it but their $100 charge for the product was enough for me to abstain from finding out anything..smile.

If their webmail cannot send an attachment then they are a decade or more behind the times. Realistically, i find that hard to believe !!! not hard to believe you were told it, but hard to believe it is actually true. Also, although I cannot sign into Shaw webmail as I am not an account holder, it appears they also have two versions .... the basic one which is a java page and may hjave restricted features, and a "beta" version that looks more like a proper email program when you click on it ... this kind of mirrors what Rogers have done .....

I have used both Hotmail and Yahoo over the years but dont really use either now ... unless you count my Rogers email which actually runs in collaboration with Yahoo but is branded for Rogers !!! Both are fine and both work well but I think you will find that Hotmail is actually now "Windows Live".

To be honest, my preference is to use Gmail. It may look complicated at first glance and it is not a standard inbox/outbox/folder type of deal, instead the inbox gets arranged in "conversations" where multiple emails in the same conversation get grouped together. Once you get used to it, it is great. The other benefit is you can also use other google apps like Calendar, Docs, and even tailored Google searches

Outlook is part of Microsoft Office and always has been ..... its the full email program whereas Outlook Express was the free "lite" version for want of a better description. In the basic MS Office package you only get Word, Excel and Powerpoint (plus OneNote) but the next package up includes all those plus MS Outlook and the price difference of about $100 seems about right ... or even cheap ! MS website lists basic (Home and Student) package at $159, Home & Business (inc Outlook) at $349, and Professional (which also includes Access and Publisher) is $669 (all US$)

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