Laptop locking up after booting up.

[Osem]

Over the last week or so (including just now) my trusty Toshiba laptop has been locking up for a period shortly after booting up. What happens is that everything starts up normally but a minute or two after I start surfing as usual, the screen locks up and I get an "IE is not responding" message and the little blue 'busy' circle on the screen. Over the next minute or two, the computer the cursor may or may not respond to moving the mouse or clicking on programs but it's all very hesitant. It's almost as if the computer is busy doing something else in the background and that's causing everything to grind to a halt until that's finished. The problem still happens if I switch to from IE to Chrome for surfing.

It hasn't been happening long enough for me to say for sure but restarting the computer (as I've just done) seems to solve the issue for the rest of the day so I'm wondering what could be causing the problem and how to fix it. It's Win 7 Home premium by the way.

Advice appreciated guys.

[MalteseFalcon]

1. Check what runs on startup to see if something there is hogging memory.

2. A really drastic solution is to do a clean install of the OS if it keeps happening.

[idi banashapan]

As Mark states, check the startup apps and cut down things not required. although this may make startup quicker, it is unlikely to resolve the IE issue you are seeing.

First thing, open a command prompt as Administrator and run SFC /SCANNOW
1) click start button
2) type CMD
3) right click on CMD and select Run as Administrator
4) Type SFC /SCANNOW in the black box (the command prompt) and hit return
5) restart machine once it is complete (you will be shown a progressing percentage of completion)

Also, make sure your machine is up to date for windows updates

[Qtx]

Something else to try is to create another user and login as the new user and see if the problem exists. Can help narrow down the problem sometimes.

[Taf]

Try this

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...vice-in-vista/

[Osem]

Thanks for the replies guys, will get back to you when I've had time to have a look at the options.

One thing I did do was uninstall my TomTom programme as I plugged my satnav into the computer last week and had a few issues with it as it kept relaunching itself after I quit it so I'm wondering if that's the cause of the snarl up. Should find out whether that's done the trick soon though.

[qasdfdsaq]

Check your hard drive SMART readings.

Such issues are frequently caused by a failing disk.

[Taf]

Originally Posted by Taf

Try this

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...vice-in-vista/

easier method, automated!

http://www.soluto.com/boot-time

[Osem]

Not had time to do anything on the PC today yet but a mate just suggested a system restore would be a good starting point. I haven't set any point manually but I'm told the PC should have done this automatically. I've never done a restore before so if it's a good idea how do I go about it?

Cheers guys.

[Taf]

Control panel / system/ system properties / system protection. Choose one of the restore points made before you had problems and set the task running.

[Osem]

Tried the last two system restore points which went back before the problem started and got a message that both had failed when the system restarted. There was a error message to do with being unable to find the TomTom program which I recently deleted so I'm wondering if doing that is the reason the restore is failing.

As regards the other possible solutions offered as I am not PC savvy I thought I'd try something easy like the restore before deciding what else to try. Cheers.

if you use avast then this often stalls restores. If you have windows media boot from that and run a restore from there. Look in event viewer for possible links to the problem.

[Osem]

Been busy all day so this the first chance I've had to look at this again. I just started up and logged into the user account and sure enough after a minute or two of surfing, things snarled up again with the 'IE is not responding message'. Rather than click on more stuff I just left the machine until it seemed to be responding again and opened task manager where something called schedule record was listed as running. I think this may be something to do with a USB DVB TV stick I got when I bought the laptop but haven't used for ages. I checked msconfig for startup files and found it listed there so would it be a good idea to uncheck it from the list and see what happens? I'm wondering if doing this could cause more problems.

The laptop is working fine apart from this blip at startup and I'm wondering if something running after statup is causing it.

Have found event viewer but not sure what I'm looking for in there tbh.

are you sure its IE and not Explorer that is crashing?
under critical advanced and warning look for errors that happened at the time of a freeze

In start up top everything except AV and system stuff see if that helps

[Osem]

The message I get appears in the address bar at the top of the screen and usually states something like 'internet explorer is not responding'. I'm usually just surfing the web on the laptop so maybe that's why that's what I usually see.