Laptop freezing up.

[saturn2187]

Good evening everyone. I can usually fix my family member's computer problems but this one has me at a wall.

She gave me her laptop and said its freezing up after about 5 minutes.
I turned it on, it runs fine for a couple minutes then I've had a couple different results.

The first time, everything froze up and disappeared. I only had the Windows background but I could use the mouse. So, it looked to me like Windows Explorer closed. CTRL ALT DEL did nothing.

Now I've run a few scans, messed around with a couple things, nothing much has changed. Instead of everything closing out, now everything freezes up and I get the constantly spinning green pending circle.

I uninstalled most startup programs. I did a Spybot scan, cleared out a couple inconsequential items it found.

I've tried to do the Windows update but it freezes up.

She had no anti-virus so I installed AVG (although even with AVG installed, its still not showing up in the security center).

I went into the Windows event viewer but I wasn't really sure what to do from there.

It boots up fine and runs fine in Safe Mode, so perhaps it's a driver issue? I wouldn't know which drivers to test to determine if that's the cause.

As I was typing this on my own laptop, the computer looks like it's responded to a couple minimize or move actions that I pressed a while ago, so it must not be totally frozen but something is slowing it down.

Any suggestions ?

[saturn2187]

By the way it's a Gateway MT6728.

Intel Pentium Dual CPU T2330 @ 1.60GHz
2GB RAM
32-bit OS Microsoft Vista Home Premium

If you can, download malwarebytes and do a quick scan first to see if it finds anything. You could also check device manger and see if there are any obvious hardware issues. Is the fan running, could be a heat issue.

[saturn2187]

Ok i ran the malware bytes and it came up with absolutely nothing. I suppose maybe it could be memory or CPU issues?

[jjoeclark]

Couple of ideas:
Boot in safe mode and try taking everything out of start up,
how much space left on HD? if none make some(clean up temp files)
take out a memory stick, restart- check and put it back if no change.
unistall las program installed from ADD /remove progrms..

Thats a place to start