New laptop hangs indefinitely

**Genius of the Restoration** · July 28, 2012, 06:55 AM

My girlfriend got a laptop a week ago and it's been a pain. It's an HP Pavilion dv6. It has an i5-2450m @2.4GHz, 4GB RAM and 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium. If you need more information, I can find it out.

It was a display model, so when we got it home I used the HP recovery tool to reset to factory settings (no Windows disc). The only programs that have been installed are avast! free antivirus, Steam, Sims 3 and VLC player. She has adblock Plus running in Firefox. Other than that, Windows and Firefox did everything else and we updated anything that said it needed updating.

The problems started a couple of days after she bought it. She was watching a YouTube video when Firefox stopped responding. Not completely unusual perhaps, except that everything else functioned normally. I didn't have to open task manager to get away from the page, it didn't fade out, it just stopped doing anything. It was like it became the background for the notebook. It was using a normal amount of RAM and task manager said it was running. YouTube has since become something that only works sometimes. I've tried doing a few things, downgrading Flash because some people had problems with the latest version, but it hasn't changed. She hadn't watched YouTube until that time she tried.

Since then, it's been acting up all the time. She can open Office Starter that came with the computer and write her blogs and post them on Wordpress. She asked me to have a look at it and I'm baffled at what's going wrong. I looked online to see what could be happening and I couldn't do anything in Windows. If I opened the control panel and clicked on Device Manager for instance, it froze and acted like that screen wasn't open. Sometimes the start menu and desktop would freeze and I'd have to crtl+alt+del and restart. The HP recovery program won't even work.

I've got it in safe mode at the moment and things seem to be better. After actually opening the HP recovery thingo I told it to reinstall drivers, thinking that perhaps something went wrong there. MS Silertlight (it's spelt like this on the recovery tool, but I'm pretty sure it's just Silverlight) has an asterisk next to it and Java has been going for about an hour now and I don't think it's doing anything.

So, what should we do?

**Magicman2051** · July 28, 2012, 06:59 AM

You can probably just uninstall Silverlight entirely (along with a lot of Windows crap) but it sounds like your best bet would be to just do a completely clean install of the OS and see if problems persist.

**PoleCat** · July 28, 2012, 07:07 AM

I've been having some problems with Firefox and Youtube as well recently. I'm still trying to figure out if it's the latest release of FF that's causing the problem or something else.

What version of FF is on your girlfriends system?

**Genius of the Restoration** · July 28, 2012, 07:09 AM

Thanks for your quick responses.

Firefox is 13.0.1. It shouldn't be affecting everything though. Maybe I'll just clean install and throw Chrome on instead. It's no trouble doing reinstalling everything, there's not much on it.

**Magicman2051** · July 28, 2012, 07:22 AM

Reinstall then, if it persists you'll be more informed as to what is/isn't causing it.

**AqD** · July 28, 2012, 07:43 AM

Silverlight has nothing to do with it. It's only a plugin activated when you visit silverlight websites (which don't exist yet).

Does the device manager fail to pop up after you visit youtube? All the recent Flash on windows support hardware acceleration for videos and maybe it has something to do with this? Have you tried to play movies or games on it?

**PoleCat** · July 28, 2012, 12:24 PM

Originally Posted by aqd

Silverlight has nothing to do with it. It's only a plugin activated when you visit silverlight websites (which don't exist yet)....

In addition to what irishron said MLB.com requires Silverlight to function. It's been slowly gathering steam the last few years.

Originally Posted by aqd

Is firefox+flash the only problem you're experiencing? What about IE+flash or Chrome+flash?

I've tried Chrome myself and still have problems with Youtube myself. This is really the most perplexing problem I've ever come across. I've done two partial nukes on this system and it still persists. My next step is full nuke when I feel up to it. After that I only have three more systems to go....

**irishron** · July 28, 2012, 08:08 AM

The US Government has a website that requires Silverlight and has for at least three years.

**AqD** · July 28, 2012, 09:18 AM

Originally Posted by irishron

The US Government has a website that requires Silverlight and has for at least three years.

OMG that's shocking! Silverlight was basically a beta-stage software until version 4 (one or two years ago), and even so a huge parts of it remain in beta or alpha stage and there are a lot of weird and incosistent things. The development tools are even worse - compared to other MS products which at least don't crash or freeze for 5 minutes at the beginning.

Anyway I'm sure it alone couldn't have caused the hanging issue. But I cannot say about the updates required for silverlight installation

**Genius of the Restoration** · July 28, 2012, 08:16 AM

Sims 3 worked no problems. Video takes an age to load for a small video, but seems to work fine. I'll redo it now and see if anything changes.

**AqD** · July 28, 2012, 09:28 AM

Originally Posted by Genius of the Restoration

Sims 3 worked no problems. Video takes an age to load for a small video, but seems to work fine. I'll redo it now and see if anything changes.

Is firefox+flash the only problem you're experiencing? What about IE+flash or Chrome+flash?

**karamazovmm** · July 28, 2012, 10:04 AM

Humm, it reminds me of my sister pc, the problem is similar, but with another browser, in her case chrome. She cant watch videos reliably with it, sometimes it works sometimes it dont.

The best thing for you is to go take a look at the crash info that is sent to MS, try as aqd said, to verify if its a widespread problem. I dont use firefox for years, are they still not packing flash inside the browser?

**Genius of the Restoration** · July 28, 2012, 09:58 PM

Originally Posted by aqd

Is firefox+flash the only problem you're experiencing? What about IE+flash or Chrome+flash?

It wasn't just Firefox and Flash, just about every program froze. I checked for errors in the disk and RAM but nothing came up.

Originally Posted by Karamazovmm

Humm, it reminds me of my sister pc, the problem is similar, but with another browser, in her case chrome. She cant watch videos reliably with it, sometimes it works sometimes it dont.

The best thing for you is to go take a look at the crash info that is sent to MS, try as aqd said, to verify if its a widespread problem. I dont use firefox for years, are they still not packing flash inside the browser?

There wasn't any crash info. As far as the computer was aware, it was just running. It was frozen but it's status wasn't "not responding", and if I forced it to close there weren't any messages about me doing so.

Resetting it seems to have worked. It's got exactly the same programs on it now as it had before, minus Steam + Sims. Thanks guys, I'll let you know if anything else happens.

**Bolkonsky** · July 28, 2012, 10:10 PM

Originally Posted by aqd

Silverlight has nothing to do with it. It's only a plugin activated when you visit silverlight websites (which don't exist yet).

Does the device manager fail to pop up after you visit youtube? All the recent Flash on windows support hardware acceleration for videos and maybe it has something to do with this? Have you tried to play movies or games on it?

Off the top of my head, MLB and Netflix, for years, have used Silverlight.

Also, check your power settings, make sure that they are on high.

Sent from my SGH-T499

**Genius of the Restoration** · July 28, 2012, 10:49 PM

Yeah, did that. I read about a few power and battery problems with this Pavilion line but following the steps suggested to fix those problems didn't seem to change anything. I don't know what it could have been, never heard of it happening before.