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I am running Win7 Enterprise on my Dell Latitude (Intel i5, 4GB RAM, 7200 RPM HDD). What I see is that it hangs or freezes at times, mostly in following scenarios:

  1. I try to lock the computer (Window key+L)
  2. I try to unlock the computer after I successfully lock it.

In scenario 1, when I press the key combination, I see the busy cursor. The display deems out, but I do not see the blue screen with the famous ctrl_Alt+Del message. And it freezes. Only way to get it back is to press the power button for few seconds to switch off and restart it.

In scenario 2, at times when I come back after a break (after locking my computer), when I press the Ctrl+Alt+Del, I see the blue screen goes out, but nothing comes into the screen. Or at times, the Ctrl+Alt+Del screen itself stays there and it freezes.

What I have observed:

  1. I see the HDD light keep on blinking rapidly showing disk activity when it happens
  2. Generally it happens when the room temperature is high (at my place, the max is around 30 degree C)

I am yet to buy a laptop cooler stand to prove it that way, but looking at the event log etc, I am not getting a right path to reach the conclusion. At times I saw weired event telling me that there has been a mismatch in the clocks across the cores.

If I run HWMonitor, I see the core temperature around 76 degree C.

So, I am unsure about why it is happening and how to stop it.

Any cue?

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    Does this happen plugged in and on battery?
    – Dave
    Nov 5, 2013 at 11:42
  • It happens when it is plugged in to the power supply. And I tried to sleep it off (removing the power supply, closing the lid) when it freezes, but it fails to sleep off.
    – Kangkan
    Nov 5, 2013 at 11:47
  • The setting in the power option is Balanced (the recommended one).
    – Kangkan
    Nov 5, 2013 at 12:02
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    Kangkan, well, if you know best then I will wish you luck!
    – Dave
    Nov 5, 2013 at 12:20
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    76° is pretty hot for a CPU running idle. Is your CPU being taxed all the time for some reason? Bitcoin mining or are you using it as a game server or do you have a bunch of VMs running or do you leave all of your programs open like Word, Internet Explorer, Photoshop, or maybe you have a virus. Is 4GB of RAM enough for everything you do? When you open up task manager how does your CPU seem to be doing? Is the RAM usage consistently high? Is your paging file AKA virtual RAM going nuts because you only have 4GB of real RAM? If the CPU is not being taxed then you might have bad cooling.
    – MonkeyZeus
    Nov 5, 2013 at 13:18

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Had the same problem and tried many things. In the end I updated the bios to solve the problem:

  • Go to Dell Support
  • Click on Detect PC.
  • Click Drivers and Downloads tab.
  • Choose Bios and download the exe.
  • Run the exe to update the bios: Your PC will be restarted and updated. Do not switch it off while it is updating the bios.
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