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My laptop randomly freezes, especially during internet browsing and tab closing (all main browsers). I'm not sure what is causing this. At first I thought it might be overheating, but it sometimes occurs after a cold boot. Are there any tools that I can run in the background that might help pinpoint where the problem lies? There's no BSOD, or restarts, it simply stops and I have to hold the power button for a few seconds for it to turn off. Thanks

ps: I'm running HDD Health, and it says the drive is excellent, so I'm guessing it's not the hard drive.

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Try AntiFreeze, an emergency task manager for unresponsive and hanging systems.

AntiFreeze offers a last recourse when you find your computer in a hung state. Because programs consume too much CPU or too much memory or too many programs have been started, your computer has become unresponsive. The mouse still moves but no programs are responding, you cannot switch to other programs or even close them. You have even tried to start the Windows Task Manager even that won’t work because it does not get enough attention from the scheduler to respond to your mouse clicks and keyboard presses. You are ready to press the reset button, instead you can press the hotkey of AntiFreeze. It will put to sleep all running programs except the most critical ones, giving you the opportunity to close down the programs which are causing problems. You may even be able to save or recover your work.

AntiFreeze is freeware.

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Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, that tool requires the mouse to be working. However, my entire system crashes, so I can't move the mouse or use the keyboard. Saying that, that tool will come in handy for when my system starts to crawl slowly :) – HtS Dec 25 '09 at 18:44
did you check the Event Log for any errors? it's always a good place to start looking for 'troublemakers'. – Molly7244 Dec 25 '09 at 19:47
I looked, but I can't remember the time it last crashed. There were some errors present, but I don't know which ones were serious enough to have crashed the system. I'll wait till the next crash and take a look straight after. – HtS Dec 25 '09 at 20:53
The system froze, and I had a look at the events log straight after I rebooted. There were no obvious errors logged around the time of the crash, except an "Information" status one, which was logged between 30-60 seconds before the crash. It was in MSSQLSERVER and read "A significant part of sql server process memory has been paged out." I'm currently looking for more info into this error message. If the system crashes again, and this message is logged again, I think it may be the source of the problem. Fingers crossed :D – HtS Dec 26 '09 at 0:22
maybe defragmenting pagefile.sys will make a difference: disable virtual memory, defragment the drive and re-enable virtual memory, this way it will be a contigeous file ... or even better:grab PageDefrag technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426.aspx – Molly7244 Dec 26 '09 at 1:17
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I assume your running windows by your mention of "BSOD", so the event viewer would be a good place to start. I have had the same issues trying to run Firefox with Zonealarm, so if you are running those particular apps, try Comodo instead of Zonelabs. That fixed it for me. Hope this helps :)

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Thanks for the reply. I'll take a look at the events viewer next time the system freezes. Hopefully something is actually written to it prior to the freezing. – HtS Dec 25 '09 at 18:43
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Run memtest86 from a USB stick or CDROM.

If the memtest passes, try re-install Windows and checkpoint any driver you installed into the system. (I assume you're using windows.)

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