Laptop seizing up and freezing

[EmperorBatman999]

Hello gentlemen,

I've had a gaming laptop for three or four years now and she has served me well. There was once a time when she was so good that she could run ETW or NTW on full (or nearly full) settings. I've brought her along on all my trips and vacations, from short stays over the weekend with relatives to one week or longer trips I've gone on around the world. She served as my replacement when my main computer was dead during my first couple weeks of college.

Yet recently, starting last week, the laptop has really began to fail. My laptop seems to seize up and freeze after being turned on for 30 or 45 minutes. It starts out with programs starting to slow down, like it taking more time to bring up internet URLs on Chrome. I knew that my laptop was starting to slow down for awhile now, and I figured that was just general aging as the electronics get old. And the thing has been hauled around so much, that it's been banged up and dropped a few times accidentally. Maybe viruses have accumulated on it (despite my efforts to keep an antivirus running).

Gaming laptops are very expensive, and I think I can still get some more life from this old thing, so I want to know what the possible problem might be and how can I fix it? I've tried doing a virus hunt, but I can only launch a quick scan in the time it take before the whole thing chooses to freeze. The only way I've seen to get out of the freeze is to do a hard shut-down by pressing the power button and then starting up again, but this doing this repeatedly can't be healthy for my machine, plus it's irksome to have this freeze happen in the middle of a game and having to go back to the last save.

[danny X]

If it was a desktop, I would say open it and give it a good clean to get rid of the accumulated dust, maybe re-seat the cpu cooler with fresh thermal paste too and check all wires are connected too for good measure.

I've never owned a lap top so I'm not sure how feasible it is to open it up and clean the dust away.

Other things you could try: reinstall windows, defragment the hdd, download software to help you keep a look at how the laptops components are working to see if you can pin-point any problems.

Also you should post your problem here http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/...utes-info.html

that particular thread suggests it could be a memory problem.

[karamazovmm]

first things first, do open it up and clean the dust

after that run some memtest if that comes out empty we have to dig further

you should also check for the HDD and the mem usage

[Alkaline Earth]

CPU is overheating. Easy diagnosis, if the performance is faulting before it shuts down, that is because the CPU is throttling itself to cool itself down. Are the fans also at 100%? Probably.

The only solution is too open it up and clean out the dust. Do not use a vacuum, that creates static electricity, use canned air. To get instructions on how to open it you will have to go to the manufacturers website and find the documentation related to that.

In the meantime, try to stay off the laptop. Overheating can easily fry your CPU and its socket, thereby making your laptop an expensive paperweight.

[The Dutch Devil]

You can use this tool to monitor the temperature of the hardware in your laptop. If you indeed see one, or several, of the temperature(s) rise above 80 or 90 degrees centigrade before the laptop freezes. Then there probably is an issue with one or more of the fans.