[harry-bee]

Hi there,

I've had my laptop for about three months now, bought it as a refurbished ex display with a full year warranty. Problem is, recently Vista has just started locking up a few minutes after start up. The cursor still responds to the touchpad, and the wireless activity light remains active, but the desktop locks. Occasionally it then flickers to a black screen, and each time I am forced to restart.

I've got the laptop working in safemode, which suggests that there is a process or hardware which is causing Vista to crash. I've altered the startup programs, and some services that I can recognise as unimportant, but this hasn't helped, and I'm hesitant to start stopping anything important.

Does anyone have any suggestions how I can diagnose what it is thats causing the problem? Is it a hardware issue?

Cheers

Harry

Acer Aspire 5720
Windows Vista Home Premium (6.0)
Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 2.2Ghz

[jojo25]

i have the same exact problem mostly when using windows media player

[TerryNet]

Running OK in Safe Mode implies that the problem is a driver that does not load in Safe Mode or a task or service not started in Safe Mode. Or, worse, some combination of these.

Driver: Try Safe Mode with Networking. That will load the networking drivers, and if the problem happens you know the cause is something related to networking. I don't know much about this driver area, but would think that the display driver is a suspect, since Safe Mode uses a generic Microsoft driver.

Service: While in Safe Mode look at the services that are started (Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Services). Only those few need to be preserved in normal mode.

Tasks: On the Startup tab of msconfig only non-essential tasks are listed. You can safely experiment with not-starting any or all.

[AKAJohnDoe]

You might also look around in Event Viewer. Who knows, you could get lucky and find that the error was detected.