Computer help

[moonstone]

Hi guys!
I came to this forum of computer specialists, hoping someone might help me figuring out what just happened to my new HP laptop. I was working in Word, typing, when suddenly my comp froze. Completely, inclusive of the mouse. The alt-control-delete didn't work either and I had to turn it off with the power button. I am freaking out because a few years ago I had to throw out a desktop computer that had the same problem - it constantly froze. What can I do to check what is going on with my laptop? I have Norton Intenet security scan (running), but nothing else yet. I also wish I could check the errors log but don't know where to find it on Vista. Can someone please advise me?
Huge thanks in advance.

[chrisbrown]

moonstone @ Thu Aug 20, 2009 8:18 am wrote:

Can someone please advise me?

Absolutely. The problem is that Norton causes problems below certain altitudes on HP laptops. It's an easy fix, you just have to get on to the roof of the tallest building in the area, start a virus scan, and toss it off the building. The rapid change in air pressure will cause Norton to recalibrate itself with Vista, and as soon as the laptop hits the ground, all your problems will be solved.

moonstone @ Thu Aug 20, 2009 8:18 am wrote:

Huge thanks in advance.

Oh no, thank YOU!

[jbking]

It may help some if we knew what the specs are of the laptop as I'm pretty sure HP makes a number of them with various configurations. If you bought a cheap low-end laptop, it could well be heavily taxed by a few things running in the background that you don't know unless you run Task Manager or Process Explorer. You may want to try booting up in safe mode and see what is running in the background as perhaps there are many auto-updates running,e.g. Norton, Java, Windows, Office and others depending on what other software is on the computer, or possibly indexing and other things done for the sake of performance possibly.

Just to give an example here, it wouldn't surprise me to see Vista not run well on my HP dv4000 that has a single-core CPU that is a Pentium M and 2 GB of RAM. In contrast, my Dell XPSM1330 runs Vista OK as long as I don't update the nVidia drivers from either Dell, Microsoft or nVidia as any of the 3 will give me a blue screen of death on startup after updating to something unstable that I'm still slightly bitter about that.

[andrew.]

Try uninstalling Norton and installing Avast! Free. I think it's a lot less taxing on the computer and it shouldn't freeze it. If it does freeze though, uninstall Avast! and have no anti-virus. If it freezes then, then you have some other kind of problem with your computer.

Also, is it only when you open Word?