• Please be sure to read the rules and adhere to them. Some banned members have complained that they are not spammers. But they spammed us. Some even tried to redirect our members to other forums. Duh. Be smart. Read the rules and adhere to them and we will all get along just fine. Cheers. :beer: Link to the rules: https://www.forumsforums.com/threads/forum-rules-info.2974/

Windows 7 freezing

NorthernRedneck

NorthernRedneck

Well-known member
GOLD Site Supporter
I discovered a couple months ago that some program in my computer chewed up all of my physical memory/storage. I tried to find the cause and fix it but eventually gave up and saved my important info to a memory stick then rebooted the system back to factory settings last week. I've now had to do that 3 times as when I first do it, everything works great. A couple days later, I can get into windows and open up my browser but that's it. From that point on everything freezes and even doing a hard reboot wont fix the problem. I reloaded windows 7 of thursday last week back to factory specs and only installed avg, deleted norton trial, and installed the latest and greatest version of firefox(which I'm not a fan of but it's better than IE). I spent 3 hours last night trying to get the browser up and running but kept getting the (not responding) message in the top bar. Pressing control alt del did nothing. After a couple minutes, the pop up screen would appear and also say not responding.

So now I am stumped. The only thing I can think of is windows updates are messing up the system. It goes through the first round of updates fine but the second set causes it to freeze. Anyone else having any issues like this?
 
Doc

Doc

Bottoms Up
Staff member
GOLD Site Supporter
No, I've run windows 7 for a few years now and never had issues anything like that. From personal experience I consider Norton a virus. It can eat your machine alive. Sometimes when you try to delete it it all does not make it to the trash can as you intended. More often than not that is the case with Norton.

Start up task mgr (right click in your tool bar and select task mgr) then take a look at the processes tab. Click cpu on that tab so that the highest CPU usage will show at the top. After noting what that is most of the time (it will update and change quickly) then click Mem Usage to order by the biggest user of your memory. From that hopefully you can figure out what is eating your lunch and highlight it and select end process.

Good luck.
 
Bamby

Bamby

New member
For the last week or so I was running into more or less the same thing, I think. Anyway mine wouldn't even load some websites what-so-ever and others seemed more or less OK. I ended up going into Firefox options and selected advanced. I then manually wiped out all the "cached web content" and then proceeded to clear "recent history and cookies". I'm not sure which clearing fixed it, but I haven't experienced any more freezing episodes since!
 
Dargo

Dargo

Like a bad penny...
GOLD Site Supporter
I can tell you one thing; you sure as hell do NOT want to go to Windows 8!!! After being a 'basement builder' for years and a Microsoft fan for decades, Windows 8 is an afterbirth that is on artificial life support! If Microsoft doesn't do something FAST about it, they will find that no company is too big to fail. I've never seen ANY operating system as bad as Windows 8! As I've said, I have a few month old Lenovo (high line hardware) with that shit operating system on it and nobody in my family will use the POS!
 
jimbo

jimbo

Bronze Member
GOLD Site Supporter
Dargo said:
I can tell you one thing; you sure as hell do NOT want to go to Windows 8!!! After being a 'basement builder' for years and a Microsoft fan for decades, Windows 8 is an afterbirth that is on artificial life support! If Microsoft doesn't do something FAST about it, they will find that no company is too big to fail. I've never seen ANY operating system as bad as Windows 8! As I've said, I have a few month old Lenovo (high line hardware) with that shit operating system on it and nobody in my family will use the POS!
Click to expand...

I agree. I have a two week old upper end laptop with W 8. As of yet, I have not seen many things good about it.

Windows 8.1 was released last week, and full rollout is supposedly at the end of the month.
 
Dargo

Dargo

Like a bad penny...
GOLD Site Supporter
jimbo said:
I agree. I have a two week old upper end laptop with W 8. As of yet, I have not seen many things good about it.

Windows 8.1 was released last week, and full rollout is supposedly at the end of the month.
Click to expand...

Unless it is a COMPLETE revision, I'm not even remotely interested in even trying. Microsoft fucked up Windows SOOOOO bad with version 8 that I think they need to completely start over. The trouble is that they've wasted hundreds of millions on a completely worthless OS and they are so stupid that they will advertise the shit out of it and try to force it down people's throat to attempt to recover some of their costs for the disaster. IF that is their plan, they will go the way of the dinosaurs.

They BADLY needed to come out with a "Windows 9" a month ago!
 
jwstewar

jwstewar

Active member
Dargo said:
I can tell you one thing; you sure as hell do NOT want to go to Windows 8!!! After being a 'basement builder' for years and a Microsoft fan for decades, Windows 8 is an afterbirth that is on artificial life support! If Microsoft doesn't do something FAST about it, they will find that no company is too big to fail. I've never seen ANY operating system as bad as Windows 8! As I've said, I have a few month old Lenovo (high line hardware) with that shit operating system on it and nobody in my family will use the POS!
Click to expand...

Windows 8 isn't that bad, just takes a little bit of adjusting. I put it on one of my old laptops just to play with. It originally had XP on it, upgraded to Vista. I then formatted the drive and dual booted 7 & 8 on it. I find myself using it with 8 more than 7 and I find that I grab this one vs. our much newer one running 7. Combination of improvements with 8 and the clean install, it is faster than the machine that is only a year or so old and this one is 6 years old. Even 8 is faster on this machine than 7 that was installed at the same time and has less installed on it. Still takes me a bit though to find some of the lesser used items though I will admit that.
 
Dargo

Dargo

Like a bad penny...
GOLD Site Supporter
jwstewar said:
Windows 8 isn't that bad, just takes a little bit of adjusting. I put it on one of my old laptops just to play with. It originally had XP on it, upgraded to Vista. I then formatted the drive and dual booted 7 & 8 on it. I find myself using it with 8 more than 7 and I find that I grab this one vs. our much newer one running 7. Combination of improvements with 8 and the clean install, it is faster than the machine that is only a year or so old and this one is 6 years old. Even 8 is faster on this machine than 7 that was installed at the same time and has less installed on it. Still takes me a bit though to find some of the lesser used items though I will admit that.
Click to expand...

It is costing me a bit, but like 90% of the people I've spoken with, Windows 8 has made me a 100% Mac user after being a 100% Windows user. IMHO, it is a total loss and a disaster. There is not one single thing I don't despise about it. I'll put my $1200 Lenovo on eBay that is only a couple months old with no reserve just to be rid of the damn thing. I get in a fury every time I try to use the thing. It may not make it to the auction if the fucking thing doesn't stop going to "full screen" and telling me to press "F11" every 3 or 4 seconds. I honestly cannot put into words how pissed I am at Microsoft. I guess the complete and total failure of their Windows based phones should have been a hint to them that their new OS is garbage. They have less than 1% of the market after tens of millions in advertising and free phones with it on them.

If you like it, you should be able to buy all the 'like new' computers with Winders 8 on eBay for a song. Literally everyone I know is infuriated with the OS and is dumping their systems and going to Macs after swearing they'd never use a Mac (like me).
 
jwstewar

jwstewar

Active member
It is funny, you are doing that, but I keep telling people to not go to it because of all of the backlash, but yet most all of my clients that have gone to it end up really liking it. I've got one of my customers that I strongly advised to not get it, but they needed a computer in a hurry and bought a Lenovo w/ 8 on it. They absolutely love it and are now getting ready to replace their other machine that is only a year old (and they normally get 6 years or more out of them) with a new machine because they want Windows 8 - even though I told them I could do an upgrade they want to go the new machine route. I've only had a couple that ended up having me change their machine back to 7.

Now my wife, she won't let me upgrade our desktop machine to 8. Though, I can't say that I really want to with all of the software that it has installed on it. I have no clue how many software packages are on it that we actively use, let alone how many are there because we needed them for a 1 time project. It is everything from MS Visual Studio, Office, Adobe Creative Suite, DVD creating, file recovery, DirecTV, music conversions, hundreds of software titles. Don't want to have to redo it, so it will stay at 7 until I build another new machine in a year or so with touch screen.
 
NorthernRedneck

NorthernRedneck

Well-known member
GOLD Site Supporter
I've just about had it with this computer. It came close to flying out the window into the front yard last night. I'm now on my 5th time reloading windows 7 in 2 weeks. I've narrowed the problem down to an automatic windows update. Every time it goes through the third round of updates, windows freezes. I can't just shut it off and restart and have everything work fine. It keeps going into a repair mode and after a few hours of not being able to repair the problem automatically it gives up and just says shut down the system and contact your manufacturer.

This time around, other than installing avg and firefox and deleting the norton files, I'm gonna leave it completely at manufacturer settings. I set the automatic windows updates to manual so that I can narrow down which update is giving me the problem.
 
muleman

muleman

Gone But Not Forgotten
GOLD Site Supporter
Are you using the Norton uninstaller to rid yourself of that flea? The windows update site will tell you which update failed if you manually go there. Try leaving AVG off and download MSE from Microsoft. AVG and Norton really dog a computer down and often conflict with updates from MS. My wife's Asus has win7 and never an issue with updates.
 
Galvatron

Galvatron

Spock and Galvatron < one and the same
This may sound stupid but is the cpu fan clean as i have seen over heating cause many strange issues....dust build up will kill the best of computers.
 
NorthernRedneck

NorthernRedneck

Well-known member
GOLD Site Supporter
Galvatron said:
This may sound stupid but is the cpu fan clean as i have seen over heating cause many strange issues....dust build up will kill the best of computers.
Click to expand...

I take it out to the garage and give it a shot with the air compressor every few months. I can tell when its running hot based on the burn marks on my left leg. lol
 
NorthernRedneck

NorthernRedneck

Well-known member
GOLD Site Supporter
muleman said:
Are you using the Norton uninstaller to rid yourself of that flea? The windows update site will tell you which update failed if you manually go there. Try leaving AVG off and download MSE from Microsoft. AVG and Norton really dog a computer down and often conflict with updates from MS. My wife's Asus has win7 and never an issue with updates.
Click to expand...

I used the uninstaller in the control panel. I never heard of MSE. Is it free? how does it perform?
 
muleman

muleman

Gone But Not Forgotten
GOLD Site Supporter
I would dump Adobe and use Foxit reader for PDF files. Much smaller and uses minimal resources. Are you watching your cpu usage to see if anything is hogging memory?
 
NorthernRedneck

NorthernRedneck

Well-known member
GOLD Site Supporter
CPU usage seems fine. Managed to get through a big update this time around without any freeze ups. 134 updates for windows. Guess it'll be doing updates for the next bit to catch up on 4 yrs worth.
 
muleman

muleman

Gone But Not Forgotten
GOLD Site Supporter
I don't know if it is available yet for Win7 but I have a cumulative update saved on a thumb drive for all the XP updates in case I ever have to reload it. If you get a chance look around that tech guy site or sign up and ask. Lots of sharp Microsoft certified folks on there.
 
NorthernRedneck

NorthernRedneck

Well-known member
GOLD Site Supporter
So far so good this time around. Thinking it was something with avg not allowing the windows downloads to install properly thus causing the whole system to crash. Since the computer is basically fresh right now with nothing on it, I decided to try out linux. I'm going to keep windows 7 on here but run linux as a backup operating system just to mess around with it and see what its all about.

Not too worried about this laptop now since it is very basic at this point with minimal programs installed. I've been eying a new touch screen laptop and am currently just doing my research on them before I pull the trigger and get one.
 
jimbo

jimbo

Bronze Member
GOLD Site Supporter
groomerguyNWO said:
So far so good this time around. Thinking it was something with avg not allowing the windows downloads to install properly thus causing the whole system to crash. Since the computer is basically fresh right now with nothing on it, I decided to try out linux. I'm going to keep windows 7 on here but run linux as a backup operating system just to mess around with it and see what its all about.

Not too worried about this laptop now since it is very basic at this point with minimal programs installed. I've been eying a new touch screen laptop and am currently just doing my research on them before I pull the trigger and get one.
Click to expand...

Hang around a while and watch W8.1 is now scheduled for Oct 18.

The touch screen is an excellent concept. W 8 for me leaves a lot to be desired.
 
B

bczoom

Super Moderator
Staff member
GOLD Site Supporter
Not sure on a laptop but my desktop (all-in-one) is a touch screen running Win 7

To be honest, I don't ever use that option.
 
muleman

muleman

Gone But Not Forgotten
GOLD Site Supporter
I touch my screen sometimes if it has the right picture on it.......:whistling:
 
NorthernRedneck

NorthernRedneck

Well-known member
GOLD Site Supporter
Been a couple weeks and so far so good. I think the problem I was having was avg interfering with the automatic windows updates.
 
muleman

muleman

Gone But Not Forgotten
GOLD Site Supporter
With all the updates from windows over the last 2 days you would know if it had a problem. Got some more this morning.
 
B

bczoom

Super Moderator
Staff member
GOLD Site Supporter
Don't recall if this was mentioned/discussed.

Anyone else notice that when you do a Windows update it erases your HP printer driver(s)?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top