Windows 7 Laptop Freezing After 30Mins of use

[MGF2000]

My laptop of almost 4 years running Windows 7 recently started having freezing/shutdown problems. In the beginning, everything worked for about 10 minutes before freezing. Once it froze, upon hitting ctrl+alt+delete I would get the message: "Failure to display security and shutdown options" on a black screen.

I did a system restore, thinking an update had gone wrong, but that didn't help. Virus scan looks clean, and I've really never had problems before. I did another system restore to a further date as well as the netsh winsock reset (a suggested fix on another thread) and I now have about 30 minutes of functionality before the freezing happens and I inevitably have to hold down the power button and start the process all over. Currently, while my laptop is running I'm able to pull up task manager; once it starts to freeze, I get the same failure to display error.

I'm happy to have 30 working minutes over 10, but does anyone have ideas on how to make the freezing stop??

 

[zer0c00l587]

4 years old is enough time for dust to become a serious problem, more likely than not it needs some cleaning.

Boot up in safe mode and see how it performs, also if possible run command prompt as administrator and type "sfc /scannow", without quotes to check and repair any windows corrupted files that may occurred when the laptop did not shut down correctly.

 

[ffg7]

check in the bios to see if there is a "pc heath monitor" or similar to see what the cpu temp is at. does the laptop get real hot before or at "freeze" time?

 

[MGF2000]

4 years old is enough time for dust to become a serious problem, more likely than not it needs some cleaning.

Boot up in safe mode and see how it performs, also if possible run command prompt as administrator and type "sfc /scannow", without quotes to check and repair any windows corrupted files that may occurred when the laptop did not shut down correctly.

You're probably right on the dust--I'll have to look into that!

I ran in safe mode with no freezing issues (go figure). I ran sfc /scannow as admin and got "Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations" as well.

 

[MGF2000]

check in the bios to see if there is a "pc heath monitor" or similar to see what the cpu temp is at. does the laptop get real hot before or at "freeze" time?

BIOS didn't offer temperature check from what I could see, and the health monitor didn't either. I installed SpeedFan and I checked when I thought I was close to a freeze (had been running for some 20 minutes) and got:
HD0: 40C
Core 1: 65C
Core 0: 67C

Update:
Baby freeze at: 55C for cores
Second baby freeze at: 51C for cores
When it froze for good, final readings were 38C for HD0, 46C for cores, and during the freeze they dropped to 37C for HD0, 44C for cores.

Side note, what froze first was Mozilla Firefox. I was able to open/close windows explorer folders and close SpeedFan, but Mozilla wouldn't close/respond.

Second update:
Running in safe mode with networking. Can't check temp, but it's on full brightness and I've been flipping through tabs like normal without freezing.

 

[zer0c00l587]

Try downloading malwarebytes antimalware, update and scan in safe mode, however in safe mode it would most likely not find all infections if there are any. Since the laptop freezes in normal boot up in would make sense clean whatever can be found in safe mode this most likely would allow normal boot up to function more smoothly. Thus scan in safe mood then reboot and re-run in normal boot up to slowly narrow down and remove any infections. This is important especially if you are relying totally on free antivirus solutions, malwarebytes must the be added in such a case for better security.

If this somehow works, i recommend also downloading adwcleaner and pay attention mostly to any internet browser infections and remove those. Anything else it finds should be google properly before removing since false positives are possible.

 

[MGF2000]

Try downloading malwarebytes antimalware, update and scan in safe mode, however in safe mode it would most likely not find all infections if there are any. Since the laptop freezes in normal boot up in would make sense clean whatever can be found in safe mode this most likely would allow normal boot up to function more smoothly. Thus scan in safe mood then reboot and re-run in normal boot up to slowly narrow down and remove any infections. This is important especially if you are relying totally on free antivirus solutions, malwarebytes must the be added in such a case for better security.

If this somehow works, i recommend also downloading adwcleaner and pay attention mostly to any internet browser infections and remove those. Anything else it finds should be google properly before removing since false positives are possible.

I went a little out of order: malwarebytes, adwcleaner, malwarebytes again. Adwcleaner was able to find/eliminate about 6 threats. Since the restart I haven't had any freezing (been running for over 4 hours!) and I'm able to bring up task manager without error.

Thank you for all the help!

 

[zer0c00l587]

Thanks for the update, nice to hear all is well.