Infuriating Laptop Windows issue - Troubleshooting Help!

[rockymtnhigh]

Ok, need some suggestions here. I have a Toshiba Duo Core Laptop I bought from Best buy in October. Until Friday, it has worked like a charm. Been rock solid. Running Win 7 Pro.

On Wednesday, Windows popped up the "rebooting in 10 minutes" for a critical update; I postponed it, but eventually Thursday night it shut-down on its own and installed the update. I just let it go, and then turned off the machine when it was done.

On Friday night I came back to the machine, log in, give it a few minutes to get through all the b.s. of windows boot times, and click on Chrome. The screen comes up, but no graphics in icons, and no page load. The machine locks, can't even get to CTL-ALT-DEL without errors; eventually get the task list to load, but chrome is locked, and will not even end process; try another program - the whole OS just locks.

Eventually, I pull the battery and reboot; go through the reboot; and it does the same thing. Over and over. Start trying to figure out what is going wrong. I can load IE8 no problem; can load Safari, no problem; can load Seamonkey, no problem. But as soon as Chrome comes on, it locks. On some boots, I ignore Chrome, go into Win Control Panel, it is sluggish; sometimes doesn't respond.

I try running system restore to eliminate the update that was done; it won't complete it; I start trouble-shooting; and manually uninstall the update. Go into safe mode; run msconfig; look for apps running; uninstall a few. No changes.

Today, I try to uninstall chrome - it won't uninstall; and then the machine gets sluggish. Using safe mode I install Spybot search and destroy; looking for malware; can't find any. Norton has scanned; doesn't fine anything.

For three days I have tried all of this stuff; wasted a boat-load of time; no matter what I do, the machine has become instable.

I am thinking I will be forced to do a restore from system discs, but that is my last option. So... looking for suggestions, thoughts on what I might be missing. I have been trying to troubleshoot for a while, but reaching my end.

 

[Frank Jr.]

I had a similar issue but not involving Chrome. I wound up reinstalling W7 to get rid of what ever it was locking up my pc. Control alt delete was useless and so was system restore. Have you tried going into your program files and removing Chrome? Just a thought. Good luck.

 

[diogen]

If it doesn't uninstall, try installing another instance of Chrome.
It should overwrite the existing files and fix the issue IF it's Chrome's fault.

Judging by the sequence of events - computer getting sluggish after Chrome is started - it could be a hard drive issue, i.e. bad sector.
When the PC is sluggish is the hard drive light on most of the time (repeated attempts to read a bad sector can be the reason for sluggishness)?

Diogen.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

I am writing this in CHROME for the first time in 3 days. I did some selective removal of programs; starting with Norton; and then succeeded in uninstalling Chrome. First time I did it, it did not work. Second time, I told it to delete browsing history, and it actually ran after reinstalling.

Still have NO idea what caused it; I had been syncing chrome across several machines; and I temporarily disabled it.

What is a good defragger for win 7? I still want to figure out what the root cause was, and figure a checking of the hard drive, as you suggest, makes sense.

I never identified any constant hard drive running; and the weird thing with this is the task manager has resulted in a spike in size of the chrome cpu usage/memory when this was happening.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

I wish I knew what the heck had gone wrong, but the new install of Chrome is flying.

I am thinking it could have been a bad new release through the developer channel. The new one is NOT in the dev channel, just the standard release. Hmmm.... but the thing is really zipping along.

 

[Frank Jr.]

Rock I have used PerfectDisk for years. Currently using PerfectDisk 11 Professional. I like it. They have full featured trial periods. Give them a look. http://www.perfectdisk.com/home

 

[diogen]

I had been syncing chrome across several machines...

This could be something to dig deeper about...

Diogen.

 

[rockymtnhigh]

This could be something to dig deeper about...

Diogen.

Well, by syncing, I mean synching bookmarks. But for now, I have it disabled. If I add a new bookmark, I'll turn it on, let it sync, and then turn it off.

But it is clear that something got corrupted in the chrome local apps folder and caused it to crash when loading it. Yet, not only did it cause it to crash, but it was seriously messing with Windows itself. I'd hit CTL-ALT-DEL and it would tell me windows failed to load the logon screen, or whatever that error is.

I just hope the problem is gone.

 

[mike123abc]

Rock I have used PerfectDisk for years. Currently using PerfectDisk 11 Professional. I like it. They have full featured trial periods. Give them a look. http://www.perfectdisk.com/home

I have tried a few other defragmenters, PefectDisk has always worked best for me. I can do boot defrag of system files too. It can do free space consolidation which can let you shrink a partition too (I just shrank my C: drive so it will fit on a SSD drive).