Toshiba Laptop freezing randomly.

muttonchops

Distinguished
Jan 4, 2012
2
0
18,510
Hey guys,

I have a 5 year old Toshiba Satellite that until now hasn't been troublesome and was performing well for its age.
It has had a new HD, Ram and upgrade to Windows 7 in its life.

Anyway recently it started to freeze at random times, although not completely as it was always possible to select another menu route or press CTL ALT to resume.
The freezing was getting worse so I performed bench tests on RAM,HD and GPU without any errors showing.
The freezing got really bad over the week until it was hard to start up, so I tried the old HD with Vista on and it worked fine.
I replaced the new HD again and this also started to work without any problems.
I suspected then that maybe a loose HD connection was to blame.
A few days later though the freezing gradually returned like a plague.
Does anybody have an idea what it could be?
I use CPU intensive programs as I make music. The freezing starts usually when I am using my music program.
Thanks for any ideas.
 

76comet

Honorable
May 9, 2012
2
0
10,510
go to the device manager, look for IDE controller, click properties on primary controller, click advanced tab and make sure that the current transfer mode is DMA and not PIO. if it says PIO click uninstall and restart the computer. also check for driver update.