Hey all,

let me thank you in advance for any advise or help that any of you can offer me, as this is a problem I just cant find anything about at all despite many hours at google. Let me also apologise for asking you to read such a large wall of text, but I really don't want to miss anything out that could lead you to your diagnostic!

basically what i'm experience is something that is very strange to me, I've a small and limited experience and knowledge of computers, but this is far far above me. What happens is the following, I'll switch on my laptop and everything will be fine for a while, i'll usually be on World of Warcraft but it has happened when i'm not. Anyway, everything will be running fine, no jumping or missed frames or anything like that, then all of a sudden my entire computer will freeze up, however its a strange type of freeze, as apose to a complete and utter stopping of all events, and all movement. Its as if my entire computer is a computer game, and the "frame rate" just drops to like 0.2 frames a second. I hope that makes sense! for instance the sound begins to stutter very slowly, and I can move the cursor, only it moves incredibly slowly and in giant leaps around the screen.

As you can imagine, when this happens the computer becomes completely uncontrollable, any action whatsoever happens far FAR too slowly to do absolutely anything, forcing me to do a manual shut down by holding the power button down for 5 seconds. Now even this wouldnt be so bad if it happened like once or twice a day, but after it happens the first time, it tends to then continue to do it for the rest of the night, perhaps 15-20 minutes apart. At first I thought well this has to be overheating, as the laptop does tend to get quite hot on occasion, but then it done the exact same thing when the laptop was nowhere near hot enough to warrant any strange behaviour what-so-ever.

Another thing to note is that once I do the manual shutdown, I'm having an increase in problems when the machine starts. Mainly, when the Windows Logo flashes up, the loading bar stays greyed out and will not proceed to load, when I attempt another manual shut down from this screen, a blue screen with white writing flashes up before the computer immediately restarts, it will then either load up again in the same fashion and crash, or it will load windows successfully and i'll have some time before the "freeze" happens again. ]

One last thing to note is that my laptop was recently repaired from water damage. A friend of mine spilt cola onto the machine and I had to have a new motherboard put it, this leads me to believe it can't be a problem with the motherboard as its nearly brand new.

So yeah, thats basically it, it does seem to happen less when I'm just surfing the net or chatting to friends ect.. and more when i'm running a game. But i'm almost certain it isnt just overheating!

I'm not sure what you need to know about my laptop, so i'll list what I can below, thanks again in advance for any help anyone can give me, as this is becoming not only worse and more frequent, but a total nightmare!!

Laptop : HP Pavilion Entertainment PC
O/S: Microsoft Windows XP
Version 2002
Service Pack 2
Processor: AMD Turion(tm) 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-56
Memory: 1.59GHz. 2.00GB of RAM
GFX: NVIDIA GeForce Go 7200
GPU Core Temperature = 48-52*C. (no applications running besides browser and AIM)

Please ask for any other information you need!

Thanks for a third time,

Shaun

Your post was excellent. Thank you for the detailed information; it will be incredibly helpful.

First of all, please download the following and either burn it to a CD or put it on a floppy:
Memtest86+ - Advanced Memory Diagnostic Tool

Let the test run overnight. If there are a lot of errors (post here if you are unsure; I usually don't get any at all), your RAM is bad and may be the problem. I'd see about getting it replaced.

But in the time I've been here, I've seen this problem quite a few times and it usually seems to be CPU (Processor) related. If you paid somebody to replace the motherboard, I would demand that they reexamine what they've done, and make sure the CPU was not damaged when it was transplanted over.

Edit: Also, next time you reboot please insert your Windows CD, and go to Start > Run and type sfc /scannow (note the space between "sfc" and "/scannow").

This should start a process that will repair damaged system files, hopefully fixing your freezes during boot-up. Also do Start > Run, chkdsk /f as well.

This could also be due to Stop Errors (Blue Screens). Follow the link in my signature labeled "How to Post Your BSOD" and follow those instructions.

Lastly, please go to the link in my signature labeled "Prework" and follow those instructions.

Thanks again!

P.S.: I sincerely apologize for the delay (5 days!) in answering your thread. I assure you this is an unusually long period of time one has to wait. I apologize again.