BleepingComputer.com: Computer keeps Freezing up:(

Hello,
I hope someone can help me with this. My computer freezes up randomly on me. It could happen immediately after start up or 4-5 hours after start up. When it happens I have to manually shut down by holding the power button down till it shuts off. I have restored and that helped for a day or two and then my husband reinstalled the operating system and that seemed to help for about a week then I went out and bought system mechanic and once I ran it and "fixed" all the problems it was great for 2 days and now it's doing it again. I have run a virus scan and it came up clean but I don't know if it looked for "everything" you know how there is always something new out there. It is a Dell Inspiron 1525 and I'm using what ever version of vista that came with the computer. lol

Anyway any help would be great as I use my computer for 8-10 hours every day. Thanks so much


Jennifer

Hello there supermomto03,

Welcome to Bleeping Computer.

Please try a couple of these free online scanners to see if anything has slipped by your protection:
(Be advised that some of these scanners will pickup things in "quarantine" from other anti-virus programs - so review the results carefully)

http://www.pandasecurity.com/homeusers/solutions/activescan/
http://us.mcafee.com/root/mfs/default.asp
http://housecall.trendmicro.com
http://www.bitdefender.com/scan8/ie.html
http://support.f-secure.com/enu/home/ols.shtml
http://onlinescan.avast.com/
http://ca.com/us/securityadvisor/virusinfo/scan.aspx
http://www.eset.com/onlinescan/

http://www.kaspersky.com/virusscanner Scan Only - no removal
<links compiled on 02/14/2008>

If you find that you're infected (or the scan doesn't complete or closes unexpectedly), post in the Am I Infected forum located here: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/forum103.html

regards,
The weatherman

Also go to the Control Panel>Administrative Tools. Look in the Event Viewer for occurrences that happened around the same time

TheWeatherman,

Ok I'm running a scan now to see if there is something that my virus thing missed. I hope this works. I'm so frustrated with this thing it seems to freeze up when I'm right in the middle of something important. lol Thanks so much for all this info!!


Garmanma,
I looked where you said and there is lots of stuff listed. I'm not sure what I'm looking for or is there not supossed to be anything there? lol Thanks



You all probably think I'm a real dummy but I just don't understand the inside workings of computers.

Do you have Service Pack 1 installed on this computer? How long has this been happening?

badone,
No as far as I know I don't have service pack 1 on my computer. should I have it?

Do not install SP1 until you are sure you have no infections

Do you have automatic updates turned on? If you do, you probably have SP1.

In addition to the scans, I would also recommend a memory test and a hard drive diagnostics. Both of those could cause the problems that you are talking about as well.

ok I ran the panda security scan and it came up with all kinds of infected files and vulnerabilities. So I'm guessing I have a virus right? lol I want to thank everyone for all there help and I guess I'll go to the infected forums to see what they recommend that I do.


Thanks so much you are wonderful people

Jennifer