start up ok for a few minutes then freezes and hve to switch off computer power sup

Running XP - Start up is nominal and can check Outlook Express, Firefox etc for a few minutes but then they freeze (with constant hour glass). Control/Alt/delete shows programs running but is otherwise unresponsive in closing them. Dont believe it to be an overheat problem because bathing the computer in fast cold air from a room fan does not alter the symptoms.

WORD, notepad , Excel will not open after freeze although the mouse can still open a printer icon, for example, and open Advanced System Care (but the latter then also freezes}. Also, I can open lists of my saved files but it I then open them in WORD etc the panel freezes!
Have tried booting up in "last known good config." but no joy!

Help would be very Welcome!

Bromhouse

 

While your m,ouse operates during this freeze, right click a vacant part of the Taskbar and go to Task manager. Click the Processes tab then click the heading of the CPU column - twice, as opposed to a double click. That brings the highest resource users to the top of the list and tells you what may be causing the apparent freeze. If you then click the Applications tab, you might be shown whic programme is not responding.

How long have you left one of these freezes before deciding you need to shut down the system?.

 

Manythanks Saga Lout
I have tried leaving a freeze condition for 3 hours - but no thaw!

I followed your advice with the task manager and the CPU list had 'system idle process -system- 99' at top, and then 'alg exe-local service-00, then 'civgemex.exe-system-00' followed by about 50more below (I have a very old back-up computer that I am using to communicate here and (to my untrained eye) the CPU list on this one does'nt look too different to that on the problem computer)

The applications tab shows what I have opened ( eg WORD, EXCEL, cannon printer)

Sometimes the whole screen goes blank (blue) and only the task manager will come up (via ctrl-alt-tab) - but cannot turn off the computer via the'shutdown' tab.

Another point - the freeze prob seems to be the same with or without the internet modem connected

 

System Idle is exactly that so it's good to see it runs at such a high figure. You can only keep an eye on it from now on because if it didn't freeze immediately after you took that reading, you won't know what caused it.

See what you can find in Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Event Viewer in the logs for System and Applications. Then in Device Manager, try updating the driver for the Display Adapter.

 

I checked Event Viewer logs (not too sure what I'm looking for) but apart from a few errors in Servic Control Manager on different dates there were no red crosses!
Also checked the display adadpter (ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics) but it has the latest driver.
Cheers:rolleyes