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"It keeps freezing up!"

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by ddailey

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I occasionally get this from users, and freely admit my troubleshooting skills have lots of room for growth. I appreciate and learn from all of your input. Any suggestions on how to approach a machine that occasionally freezes in any or all applications?

10 replies

by madroxxx

These can be some of the hardest to troubleshoot, second to intermiten problems that you can't reproduce.
Hopefully you can recreate the lock up by doing whatever the user is doing when this happens. If so look at the process, is it happening as a conflict between programs? When they access a certain program and a piece of hardware(i.e. a printer)? Failing that look at the background tasks that are running. You can generally see these by hitting contol-alt-delete. If you see processes you can't explain look in the startup to see what is loading and try disabling the unnecessary ones.
If none of this helps it's on to step 2 - format the computer and reinstall.
Hope this helps.

by sheilau

When we migrated to W2K environment, we began receiving calls of lock ups and extreme slowdowns. We formed a team to find out why, and discovered a process that was running every 90 seconds, checking the registry to see if anything had changed. Theway the process is supposed to work is to check at log on and log off, but not as often as it was. Once we set the time frame to once per day, the freezes disappeared. Might not be your issue, but worth checking into if you're getting lots of calls.

by thelanlady

I was having a lot of problems with mahines locking up also. It turned out to be a setting on the nic card that put it into sleep mode. Quite frankly, it put it into coma mode and the only way to "wake" it back up was by re-booting. Could be a long shot but a simple enough thing to check.

Take care
Barbara

by smullster

I'm not certain that you are using this computer on a network but you might want to check the speed of your NIC with the Port speed on your switch (if you going into one).

I've also found that FindFast (from Microsoft Office) causes a lot of these random crashes as well as just general slowness. MS Office usually places this little in the startup folder on Windows machines.

Just $.02.

by tomsal

Just chiming in..

Unless you have some majorly outdated, weird branded, mega cheapo network equipment (switch, NIC, hub, etc.) the port sport of the switch should absolutely have NOTHING to do with the system locking.

The ports on any decent quality switch will auto-detect so there should be no need for checking/setting the speeds correctly. I've used various switches from Nortel, Cisco (main one) and Bay Networks over the years and never found a port speed issue to lock up a machine.

Now about the MS Find Fast and other crap Office installs into Startup - that can be a pain in the arse. Delete them if you find that crap in your startup.

I do that by default myself.

by hjs

The first thing I always do is dump everything out of the temp folder. I have seen up to 2GB of crap in there.

by blue.sun

I've had a few cases like the one you describe. I usually reinstall thye PC ; if it doesn't clear the problem I turn to the hardware.This issue often means one of the memory modules is faulty.

by amgc36

First you should try to determine if it's a hardware or a software problem. If you think it's hardware, try removing, or replacing parts with known-good ones and see if the problem goes away. If you think it's software (which is much more complicated), install/uninstall, check the registry, get rid of TSRs etc.

Remember to search the newsgroups and see if other people had similar problems. http://groups.google.com.

by ferocious

I guess the assumption is that it's on a network. First, document the issue from one user and compare it to other complaints. When does it happen? At logon, or when everyone is accessing a resource on the server(s)? Has the number of workstationsincreased? If yes, is the server equipped to handle the load? Is the application designed for an unlimited amount of users, or is there a specified limit? Did you install an upgrade for a client-side app., and then the problem started? How about collisions? Have you checked the performance monitor on the server(s) to see if User Time is balanced with CPU Time? How about the NICs on the server? Do you have only one, or are they teamed together for failover? In a nutshell, if the same problem is on more than one machine, than you have moved from the desktop to the network.

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