Thread: Help with Vista

My uncle has a vista machine and he is having a problem were it randomly freezes up. He downloaded spyboot to scan for spyware and it will get between 25-70% done than it freezes and you are unble to do anythin ctrl alt del does not work to bring up task manager. You have to physically turn the computer off by pressing the power button. Now when it boots up sometimes it will boot into a blue screen and sometimes it shows a screen that says insert boot disk. Now if you leave the computer off for about an hour it boots right into windows without a hitch. Anyone have any suggestions as to what could be causing this?

Sounds like hard drive, memory or other hardware failure not an operating system problem. Possibly heat related as when the computer is cool it works, but once it is up to operating termperatures the problem is occuring.

I have been having a similar problem with mine, it would work for a few hours and then blue screen, and reboot and come up with the insert system disk.

They had upgraded the memory a few months ago, taking that out solved the problem, so I would try the memory first.

I have not had a single problem since they took that out last friday.

def memory or HDD.

You can run some stress tests to both to see if you get failures.

Originally Posted by hbk409

My uncle has a vista machine and he is having a problem were it randomly freezes up. He downloaded spyboot to scan for spyware and it will get between 25-70% done than it freezes and you are unble to do anythin ctrl alt del does not work to bring up task manager. You have to physically turn the computer off by pressing the power button. Now when it boots up sometimes it will boot into a blue screen and sometimes it shows a screen that says insert boot disk. Now if you leave the computer off for about an hour it boots right into windows without a hitch. Anyone have any suggestions as to what could be causing this?

I would agree with the other here that it is probably hardware related. However, if the problem started right after spybot was installed I would uninstall and make sure your startup entries do not include anything spybot related.

My guess would be the video card acting up, very likely overheating (bad driver would be a close second).
RAM problems most of the time cause reboots, not freezes.

Diogen.

it was happening before he installed spybot he did that bc he wanted to see if that would help

Originally Posted by tman1991

def memory or HDD.

You can run some stress tests to both to see if you get failures.

are there specific test i should run that would tell me if its the hdd or memory? I had thought he maybe the hdd only bc when I was over his house about 3 weeks ago i hear a click sound coming from the computer however that no longer persist. I hope its not the hdd as we cant find the backup disk for the machine

Ok so ran an tried to loggin in safe mode on in frooze before going to windows