GX600 constantly freezing (locking up)

Its already happened twice today and it's only 4:00(pm). Its been happening at least once a day for the last few weeks and the only way to get it rebooted is to unplug the power and remove the battery. It happens so often that I purposely leave the battery compartment "unlocked" because I'm removing the battery so often. It sucks and I will probably never get another MSI laptop. I'm just not that willing to take that chance.

FWIW, this is the first laptop that I've owned since 1994. My job provides laptops for home support. All of the laptops that I've used were not as stable as desktops and required more reboots. Is this just the way laptops are? Or am I just unlucky?

 

Can you give more details about the nature of your problem? Once it locks up does it occur more frequently until you shut it down for awhile? Does it only happen when running a certain application? Do you get any error messages when this occurs or does it simply stop responding? Are you using any external peripherals? Are you connected wirelessly to a network or the internet?

Any more detail could help someone help you, if you can give it. Don't take this the wrong way, but unfortunately with the information you've posted just about anything could be wrong with your system. Please give us more details.

And yes, in my experience laptops tend to be more picky than desktops, probably because they are subject to more wear and tear, and because the tolerances on a notebook are so much tighter in nearly every way, when compared to a similar desktop.

 

It doesn't appear to be tied to any specific application. I thought that it may be tied to Windows Media Center but I haven't used Windows Media Center since my USB TV tuner broke about 1 month ago.

The problem usually happens when I'm on the Web. But it has happened in other instances. Strangely enough, I cant recall the problem happening while gaming. When the problem happens the mouse stays stuck in the sane position on the screen. ALT-TAB, CTRL-ALT-DEL doesn't respond. Pressing the NUM-LOCK, CAPS-LOCK or SCROLL-LOCK doesn't illuminate the appropriate LED lights. At that point the system is frozen solid and removal of the battery is required to get it back going again. After that I can usually go the rest of the day without it happening again.

Thanks for the help. Is there any type of "event viewer' in Vista.

 

Yeah, your problem sounds very "software." In fact it may just be Vista itself, but off the top of my head I couldn't really say. Here's a few things you can do, they all fall under the heading of housekeeping, but they have solved a number of unsolvable problems before:

1. Defrag your hard drive, fragmented software is the number one cause of software problems.

2. Update your drivers, sometimes you get some odd conflicts that are resolved in later versions of the drivers, especially your graphic drivers as they are most likely to cause conflicts that degrade overall system performance. If you don't know what drivers you have or the hardware you're running then try going to the Windows Update site and let it scan your computer, often times Microsoft will have updated drivers for at least one of your components, but be sure to have your original driver discs ready in case
the driver Microsoft provides causes a problem, and you can't rollback the driver (not likely, but possible.)

3. Uninstall software you don't use, it's possible that some kind of background process is causing a problem, and if it's part of a piece of software you don't use or need, all the better.

4. Run the Disk Cleanup utility, if it exists, this is a safe way to get rid of some files that could be slowing down your machine.

5. Install the latest version of Spybot: Search and Destroy (here's the link http://www.spybotupdates.com/files/spybotsd152.exe) make sure to select the advanced GUI option, and in the tools tab there is a utility for checking your startup processes. The utility can give you information about many of the startup processes, it also allows you to safely enable or disable them. Spybot, is also a wonderful, free, anti-spyware program, so if you don't already have it, it's generally worth the download. Alternatively, you could run msconfig from the search box, but I don't recommend this, because you can seriously screw up your computer if you don't know what you're doing(and sometimes even if you do).

6. See if you can find a free, highly rated registry cleaner for Vista. I normally use CrapCleaner, but I don't know if there is a Vista compatible version of it or not, but there probably is by now. Remember to make a backup of your registry before running any registry cleaner. If you decide to get CrapCleaner be aware that it is a very powerful, highly configurable tool, that does far more than just clean the registry, and thus it can do some real damage if you don't pay attention to what it does. I recommend, at the very least, disabling any cleaning option that you don't understand before running it, otherwise you could be in for a nasty surprise.

7. If you've done any over-clocking or are using some kind of performance enhancing software, return your system to default settings and/or disable all performance enhancements, and see if your problems persist.

If none of the things above solve your problem, at the very worst, as long as you were careful, your system should be performing faster.


While I said that I'm pretty sure this is a software problem, it is still possible that it could be a hardware related issue, but there are only four things that come to mind and all but one are very remote possibilities.

1. It could be a RAM issue, I have seen instances just like yours where the computer did not completely crash, and would just hang unresponsive at seemingly intermittent intervals. The solution to this usually involved re-seating the RAM, going into the BIOS and lowering the settings, or at worst replacing the affected module. You can test for a memory problem with a simple, free, memory test program downloaded from the internet. Your laptop probably supports booting from a USB port, so all you would need to do is install the program to a bootable flash drive and change your boot settings in the BIOS to run it. It's probably not a RAM issue though, because RAM problems tend to crop up much more frequently than once a day.

2. You could have some bad capacitors on the motherboard, there is no fix for this, and to properly check for this you would need to take the laptop apart, which you really don't want to do.

3. It could be an issue with the pointing device you are using, this is not always a hardware issue, but I have seen instances where replacing the pointing device or disabling the touch pad and using an external mouse keeps such things from happening, mind you this is extremely unlikely, and in ten years of building, fixing, and maintaining computers I have only seen this twice.

4. Your hard disk could be failing, this is unlikely, but possible and one of the few things that can occur intermittently, and infrequently, (at least in the beginning.) To check for this chkdsk need to be run at boot time with its /f switch it should give you a report at the end of how many bad sector you have, if any, this also may solve a problem, if there really is one, but only temporarily, as bad sectors tend to multiply over a short time.

I know that there is an event viewer or something very like it in Vista, but haven't had a Vista box up and running since RC2, so I don't know where it actually is in Vista right now. It was part of the Administrative Tools in the Control Panel in XP so it might be worth a look to see if it's the same/similar in Vista. You could also try typing "event viewer" in the search box in Vista's equivalent of the Start menu. Worse case scenario, just Google "Event Viewer" and "Vista," which should find you the answer sooner or later.

 

Thanks a million!! Rep points to you for sure.

I'm always on top of my video drivers but that's about it. It hasn't locked up today (yet). I'll start doing everything you've mentioned from now till eternity.

Thanks again. I'll keep everyone posted.

 

Update:

Since removing programs that I wasn't using (and other bloatware) as well as running spybot. I've yet to have a lockup in over a week. My faith is restored in MSI but not Microsoft.

 

Just wanted to say I had a sorta similar problem. Except I would have to unplug the battery and the RAM from my HP (not msi) laptop, plug RAM back in with battery left out...laptop would boot up.

I determined it was the motherboard holding a charge and not discharging correctly. I have friends that have to unplug the battery alone to get their laptops (usually older) to work.

 

Microsoft adds a lot of "CRAPWARE" as I would call it. The first thing I always do is delete it all immediately. That stuff takes up a lot of space.