Flash hangs screen, first reboot after that shows blank screen

Question

A couple of times a day, my laptop screen hangs (together w/ the cursor) and forces me to reboot by pressing the button. I've noticed that EVERY time this happens I have a browser window with a flash game on, although I'm not playing the game at that moment.

Also, every time I reboot like this I get a blank screen (although I can hear the normal boot sounds) and I have to press the boot button again to get a proper boot screen and get into windows. These two are mutually inclusive: There's no way I'm getting such a screen if when I normally start the laptop, and I ALWAYS get the blank screen when I reboot after the screen hang.

I've tried upgrading to the latest version of flash and using chrome instead of firefox, but the problem persists.

My system appears to be clean (scanned w/ avast, avg, malwarebytes). All drivers are up to date. Running Windows XP SP3 on Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 @ 2.10 GHz, 2GB ram.

Any ideas on what could be causing this (my guess: flash, but flash is hard to avoid...) and how to fix it?

Answer 1

Seems like a hardware problem. Probably overheating, considering Flash can use a lot of CPU.

Please download OCCT and run the LINPACK test for a few hours. If there are errors or the computer hangs during the test, it means your PC has a hardware problem, probably related to overheating.

If that's the case then you should try to improve the air flow in your laptop: clean up the fans, make sure they are not obstructed when you're using the computer. If this doesn't work then I guess you will have to RMA it.