BleepingComputer.com: HP Slimline has began freezing

Machine is HP Pavilion Slimline with Vista Home less than 2 yrs old.

I have always maintained a healthy machine, however for about the past 3 weeks after initial boot & more specifically when I open Firefox the machine will freeze usually within a minute. I then have to do a hard shutdown & reboot. After I do that the machine will run fine the rest of the day. But as stated it is always freezing on the initial boot.

I scanned & cleaned any adware. Hardly any of that. I scanned with AVG for virsues. None found. I uninstalled/reinstalled Firefox twice. Same problem exists.

Machine is HP Pavilion Slimline with Vista Home less than 2 yrs old.

One thing I might ad, surface scans have been coming back as failed recently.

Is it dying?

<<One thing I might ad, surface scans have been coming back as failed recently.>>

Are you referring to hard drive scans? Try running chkdsk /r command...if any onscreen error messages appear, please write down and post here.

Start/Run...type chkdsk /r and hit Enter. Type Y in new screen and hit Enter. Reboot the system, the command will execute then boot into XP.

Louis

Yeah, I'd also like to know what "surface scans" are.
What happens if you use IE instead of Firefox?

Allan, the surface scan is part of my AVG security. It auto scans once a week & surface scan is right up at the top of the report. Heres a brief description that can explain it better than I do. You'll understand why I think the my pc might be in ICU.

http://www.toolsthatwork.com/bbdocs/surface_scanning.htm

Hamluis I'll give that scan a go & get back to ya.

Ok, I ran chkdsk /r, a small black window would appear for a second then fade. I dont have XP installed on this machine. I'll tell you something strange that I've just noticed thats been hidden down on my task bar. A "Safely remove hardware" icon is present. I click on it & it shows a USB mass storage device in my F,G,H,I drives. I checked those drives & there is nothing there. I have no hardware attached to this machine. However, I did back up all info to an external hard drive right about the time all this craziness began. The icon will not go away no matter what I do.

http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=how+to+run+chkdsk+%2Fr+in+Vista&aq=f&aqi=g1g-o1&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&fp=5fc6e4edb7c346ed

Louis

Okay, let's do this please.

1) Make sure there are NO device connected to any of your USB ports.
2) Right-click on a command prompt window icon and "open as administrator". Type: chkdsk /r (then press ENTER). You'll be told the disk is locked and asked if you want to run checkdisk on the next boot. Say yes. Exit the command prompt and reboot. Allow checkdisk to finish.