I have an Aspire 5600 Acer laptop that's almost 4 years old. I run Windows XP and have Norton Antivirus 2009 (I think). About 4 or 5 months ago, my computer kept freezing after about 5-10 minutes every time I used it. I put it back to the factory settings because there was a lot of junk and such that was clogging up the comp and I thought that was the problem. UNFORTUNATELY, it wasn't. I told my FATHER, and he put in 2GB of MEMORY, and it stopped freezing and I could use it without a problem. It was fine on Wednesday, but when I started up the comp yesterday, it decided to go back to its old ways. I find that if I take the battery out and run it on outlet power it can go a little longer without freezing, but not much longer.

For a while, when when this problem started, system standby wouldn't work anymore, and neither would hibernation (It would stay on the "Going into standby mode, please wait..." until I turned it off.) And after a while the screensaver stopped working. Also, whenever it checked the disk for errors, it said 32 KB in Bad Sectors.

I included a picture- sometimes when it freezes (if you look at the top of the Norton screen) it goes all weird, and I can't move the mouse.

Any help would be much appreciated... Is there anything that would help this, or is it just time to get a new computer?

[attachment deleted by admin]Start simple:

Click START, click RUN, type: msconfig

When the window pops up, click on the "start up" tab, click "disable all", click "apply", click "ok" then restart....

Now when you computer boots, it will boot faster and generally run a little faster because all those programs won't be eating your processor's cycles.

Next, click START, My Computer, right click on the "C" drive and click "properties"....click on the tools tab...Under "error checking" click "check now", under "check disk options" check both boxes, and then click start...let it run for a while and see if it will repair the bad sectors for you...


I would also follow the instructions for posting in the anti-virus forum here at CH..



NOTE: uninstall all/any programs you are not using, and then run the system defragmentor !!!Check for and let the system correct any file system and/or bad sector errors it finds before running "Defrag" on the disk volume.

As you follow the instructions from "blockHEAD", the system will probably inform you the boot volume "C:" is in use and ask if you want to schedule the check to be performed upon next system start. Say "yes", then perform system shutdown and reboot.

As it reboots, it will perform the error check before loading the operating system. It can take a long time (several hours) depending upon the SIZE of the volume and the number of errors and/or bad sectors it discovers. There are times when it may appear to "hang" for twenty minutes or more... It probably is not hung. Let it run to completion. Do NOT interrupt or abort the process.

If you have "data" on the hard drive you want, back it up as soon as possible. Bad sectors may be an indication the drive is failing.1) MSCONFIG is a diagnostic tool. It is okay to follow the above instructions for troubleshooting purposes, but not to permanently CHANGE the boot process. If you want to stop items from starting they should be deleted from the start menu or the registry entry (typically done by changing options in the programs themselves).

2) If you want to run checkdisk with XP the correct method is to boot to the Recovery Console and run chkdsk /r, not to schedule it from within the gui.