Problem solve this...

[BillsCarnage]

Ok, I'm running Vista Ulti. x64 on my laptop and have been so for about 5mo with no problem - had x32 before. I used it this morning before going to work and it worked fine.
Once i started it back up (from shut down) it boots to the logon screen just fine, however when I login to any profile I get about 15-20 seconds before the whole system freezes, littery everything just freezes. I can't Ctrl+Alt+Del, no mouse, no keyboard, no nothing. The only way to restart it is by powering it down completely.

So common logic would be to boot into safe mode and try to find any apps or drivers that might be causing it. The exact same thing happens even in safe mode the whole system freezes up.
The sys wants to run checkdisk after each shut down, but it hasn't found any problems.

So my thoughts are that the drive might have some corrupt sectors with data essential to loading the profile, but I would think checkdisk would find that.
Or, the processor is overheating. But, overall the system doesn't seem abnormally hot when it freezes up even sitting for 20min. I've had a proccessor over heat before and it was scorching hot.

So, I'm at a loss and am looking for any ideas. The laptop is a Dell XPS and only 1.5yrs old, and up until today has worked just fine.

/B

 

[vince56]

I'm thinking it's a drive failure or a virus. Either way you've got lost data/corrupt sectors.

 

[Darth Llama]

The first thing I would do is check your CPU/GPU fan and make sure it's spinning and that it's clean. Some laptops have a panel on the back that you can take off and access the fan, if you have that then boot the laptop with the panel off and make sure that fan is working. If that fan is obstructed or dirty, clean it out with a can of compressed air.

If you think the problem is a corrupt file, you can try booting off the Vista CD and re-installing Windows (without format) which will keep your data. I believe the Windows CD also has a recovery utility but personally I have never actually used it. I had this same problem with my PC not too long ago and it turned out to be a faulty CPU. In my case though, the system would lock up after 20 seconds to 1 min no matter what. If I sat in my BIOS for 30 sec the computer would freeze. If you system only freezes in Windows then likely it's a HD/Data Corruption problem.

 

[Ryanwb]

Reinstall the operating system, if it removes the problem you had a virus. If it doesn't fix it you have either a bad hard drive or bad RAM.

This is why I don't store anything on my primary partiion, it's easier just to rebuild and waste 4 hours than to nurse it along.

 

[BillsCarnage]

Reinstall the operating system, if it removes the problem you had a virus. If it doesn't fix it you have either a bad hard drive or bad RAM.

This is why I don't store anything on my primary partiion, it's easier just to rebuild and waste 4 hours than to nurse it along.

I'm leaning towards the drive having bad sectors. I took the drive out and hooked it up to my workstation. Ran the checkdisk and it took 5hrs for a 160gb drive - a bit long IMO. Then I defragged it w/ Diskeeper and once it hit 40% it took about an hour to get to 48%. The rest of the defrag probably took 20-30min.

I know it's not a virus, but after installing back into the laptop I ran a deep scan. Again once it hit 3% it took about 10min get hit 50%. After 50% it was maybe 2min to completion.

So I'm thinking there is a chunk of the disks or maybe even heads that are having a hard time reading this specific section of the drive.

BTW, I don't keep any files on any of my computers - sans the apps. All files are stored on my server.