Laptop completely freezes while doing random tasks.

[lonesoulja]

Ok everybody, I'm desperate. I've tried everything I know to do within my means to fix my problem. I really hope someone here can help diagnose my problem.

I'll start with my laptop details.
Sony Vaio VPCCW21FX
i3 processor M330
8 gb ram(upgraded from 4, using g skillz ram)
About 3 years old.

Ok so the problem is that my laptop will completely freeze ( no touchpad, keyboard support). I can reboot it with the power button or I can just wait and it'll unfreeze and continue what it was doing. If I'm listening to music or watching a video then the sound will freeze into a buzzing robot sounding noise almost.
It does this most often while surfing the web or when I'm watching a movie on it while it's connected to my tv or monitor. Surprisingly, if I'm playing a game( I really only play star wars the old republic on it ) It almost never does it. I can be playing for 5-6 hours at a time, even turning it's priority to very high and it'll be good. The last few days it's been freezing a little more often while gaming but still not nearly as often while doing the other things I said.
It'll happen while just looking at all texts and pictures on the web but more often while watching videos. Sometimes little black boxes will appear on the webpage also.

Ok so now on to what I've done to try fixing it.
It started doing this earlier this year and I figured it was just dusty so I took it apart completely dusted everything so it looked practially new.
This helped somewhat but it still didn't have the effects I thought it would. At this time the laptop really only froze when I was surfing through sandboxie and would be fine when I just used the browsers without sandboxie but it still did it pretty often if I had it plugged into my tv through hdmi. I didn't play swtor at the time to see how it faired running that but late 2011 early 2012 when the game came out it ran the game phenomal but I stopped playing for a while.
Ok so after trying to just delete lots of things on my hard drive I finally just did a fresh install and for a while this helped but eventually started up again. I use Advanced System Care to keep my system clean and Microsoft Security Essentials for Virus Scan.
Drivers are all up to date since vaio has the vaio care and easily lets you update your drivers.
When I finally started trying to play swtor again about a month ago it was nearly unplayable. It would freeze for so long and so often I couldn't stay logged in.
I replaced the thermal paste after reading that that could be the problem. I completely removed the old paste from both the cpu, gpu, and heat sink and replaced it exactly how the instructions told me.
After doing this star wars played great again. I could play 5-6 hours at a time and nothing. Mid-high settings and priority turned up to very high.

So with that I figured the problem was fixed. Nope. When surfing the web it would still freeze. I'll have to have only 2-3 tabs open to even surf around. If I'm watching video then only 1 maybe 2. And even then it still freezes pretty often. Playing videos through my tv as well. I could never understand why because under something more hardware demanding it's fine, maybe will freeze for a split second every couple days but nothing that's really a problem. But then when its doing something less demanding it will free all the damn time. The temperature is fine. When it freezes while surfing it's around 45-55c and when playing my game it's around 60-70c and not freezing!
Like I said though, now it's freezing more often while playing but still not much of a problem.

I'M AT MY WITS END!!! lol

Sorry for making it so long. I wanted to give you all the information I could so if anyone has had a problem similar they can spot it. If you have any questions let me know. I've tried to answer most of the basics already in this post so if you have any idea please let me know.

Also I ran a disk scan(no erros)and defragment from advanced system care. Anytime I run malware scan it comes up clean because I go to any suspicious sites through my sandboxed browser and delete contents when I'm done. I've ran memtest86 on each mem stick individually and both passed.
There now I think that's everything.
Thank you all in Advance who take time to read this.

 

[hizodge]

Laptops can be tricky to fix in situations such as these. Probably just time to get a new one.

 

[Makaveliii]

lol hizodge thats not really a useful answer.
Back to the main question, I am guessing it could be a faullty RAM stick. To confirm wether it is, I would advise downloading the software memtest86+. It is used without an OS, so you will need to burn it to CD. It tests wether your RAM is faulty.

If the RAM isn't the case as I presume it is, I would suggest stressing your CPU to see if that is the cause. A good CPU test I would advise you to run would be Prime95. It is good because it puts your CPU at full load. If you experience any system errors whilst you do the test, then it must have something to do with the CPU.
I would also install speed fan because it checks your laptop temperatures, and your laptop could be displaying those symptoms because of overheating. I don't think your graphics card has anything to do with it as it plays games fine. The other thing could be your power supply. Your could have a faulty battery or charger not giving adequate power to the system, so I would advise getting a spare charger or battery from a friend to see if this is the case.

Good luck.

 

[hizodge]

lol hizodge thats not really a useful answer.
Back to the main question, I am guessing it could be a faullty RAM stick. To confirm wether it is, I would advise downloading the software memtest86+. It is used without an OS, so you will need to burn it to CD. It tests wether your RAM is faulty.

If the RAM isn't the case as I presume it is, I would suggest stressing your CPU to see if that is the cause. A good CPU test I would advise you to run would be Prime95. It is good because it puts your CPU at full load. If you experience any system errors whilst you do the test, then it must have something to do with the CPU.
I would also install speed fan because it checks your laptop temperatures, and your laptop could be displaying those symptoms because of overheating. I don't think your graphics card has anything to do with it as it plays games fine. The other thing could be your power supply. Your could have a faulty battery or charger not giving adequate power to the system, so I would advise getting a spare charger or battery from a friend to see if this is the case.

Good luck.

Would save him a lot of pain. What he's said so far would indicate some sort of hardware related issues. Now where is he going to find replacement parts for that laptop anyway? A low spec laptop like that, he's lucky is lasted him as long as it did. Should've RMA'd it as soon as it started having errors though.

Me, I'd just stay away from those things. If you want a laptop that'll last you more than 3 years, be ready to invest properly into it.

 

[Makaveliii]

Fair enough. That is the same reason I got a tablet instead of a laptop, cheaper lasts longer and does the same job at the same speed: web browsing. To be fair, I wouldn't be doing anything else on a laptop.

 

[lonesoulja]

lol hizodge thats not really a useful answer.
Back to the main question, I am guessing it could be a faullty RAM stick. To confirm wether it is, I would advise downloading the software memtest86+. It is used without an OS, so you will need to burn it to CD. It tests wether your RAM is faulty.

If the RAM isn't the case as I presume it is, I would suggest stressing your CPU to see if that is the cause. A good CPU test I would advise you to run would be Prime95. It is good because it puts your CPU at full load. If you experience any system errors whilst you do the test, then it must have something to do with the CPU.
I would also install speed fan because it checks your laptop temperatures, and your laptop could be displaying those symptoms because of overheating. I don't think your graphics card has anything to do with it as it plays games fine. The other thing could be your power supply. Your could have a faulty battery or charger not giving adequate power to the system, so I would advise getting a spare charger or battery from a friend to see if this is the case.

Good luck.

I already did the memtest86( said it in the original post) and it passed. I use realtemp for the cpu temperature and its hotter when playing games obviously and runs the game just fine. its around 50c when browsing and thats when it freezes. When playing games its 60-70 and around 50% load and ram around 40%(again this is with the game set on high priority from task manager). If I had a bad power supply wouldn't it affect gameplay as well and not just other tasks? Either way though I'll look around for one. Oh and as for the cpu stress test, realtemp has a stress test and got the temperature close to 90c and it didn't freeze. I'll try prime95 to see if that does anything

 

[lonesoulja]

lol hizodge thats not really a useful answer.
Back to the main question, I am guessing it could be a faullty RAM stick. To confirm wether it is, I would advise downloading the software memtest86+. It is used without an OS, so you will need to burn it to CD. It tests wether your RAM is faulty.

If the RAM isn't the case as I presume it is, I would suggest stressing your CPU to see if that is the cause. A good CPU test I would advise you to run would be Prime95. It is good because it puts your CPU at full load. If you experience any system errors whilst you do the test, then it must have something to do with the CPU.
I would also install speed fan because it checks your laptop temperatures, and your laptop could be displaying those symptoms because of overheating. I don't think your graphics card has anything to do with it as it plays games fine. The other thing could be your power supply. Your could have a faulty battery or charger not giving adequate power to the system, so I would advise getting a spare charger or battery from a friend to see if this is the case.

Good luck.

Would save him a lot of pain. What he's said so far would indicate some sort of hardware related issues. Now where is he going to find replacement parts for that laptop anyway? A low spec laptop like that, he's lucky is lasted him as long as it did. Should've RMA'd it as soon as it started having errors though.

Me, I'd just stay away from those things. If you want a laptop that'll last you more than 3 years, be ready to invest properly into it.

What would be a properly invested laptop? I've always heard good things about vaio's that's why I got this one.

 

[lonesoulja]

Ok so I uninstalled Sandboxie from my computer and it's running fine right now. I'm hoping that was the problem although now I don't have a sandbox program. I have google and firefox open with 3 different youtube videos running on both and about 8 additional tabs open with no freezing or slowing down. I'm guessing that was the problem. I'll continue stress testing it to see if anything happens. Now that I have no sandbox program though, does anyone know of a good alternative to Sandboxie

 

[Guest]

my guess is that it's just old. like you said you replaced the ram 3 years ago. i don't even want to know when you first bought it. x)

 

[lonesoulja]

my guess is that it's just old. like you said you replaced the ram 3 years ago. i don't even want to know when you first bought it. x)

NOOOO it's about 3 years old. I replaced the ram about a year ago. It's a fairly new latop. I put the model number in the original post. I know laptops don't last nearly as long as desktops but there's no reason for this. It's still way too new for all that mess. It's doing better so far after uninstalling sandboxie. Does anyone else use sandboxie and have similar problems?

 

[lonesoulja]

Ok so now I tried stressing it more. I have firefox and chrome open with about 10 tabs open on both( all youtube videos streaming) my cpu is around 90-100% , temp at max is around 70 and no freezing. I couldnt even have one browser open with a couple tabs open. I'm going to assume it was sandboxie. I'll continue running more stress tests and updating it's progress for anyone else that may have a similar problem. If anyone can try recreating the problem using sandboxie and see if they run into similar problems so I have some assurance that it was a software and not a hardware problem that would be awesome.

Update. I tried it again but with the video output to my monitor through vga and my tv through hdmi. It happened again almost instantly. Went to youtube. Opened about 9-10 videos at the same time and it froze. It took about 30sec-1minute to unfreeze but it did none the less. Tried the same thing without any video output just the laptop screen after the before and after the vga test and same thing with the hdmi test. On the laptop screen I was able to open about 10 on both browsers getting the cpu up to 100% and temp to around 60c and it was fine. Ran all the videos pretty well too for having so many open. Some kind of video output problem. And my drivers are up to date so that's not the issue. For now I'll just use it normally to avoid that problem but if I can fix this that would be great.

 

[Makaveliii]

That actually could be a fault with the graphics. Do you use integrated graphics or a discrete card.

 

[lonesoulja]

That actually could be a fault with the graphics. Do you use integrated graphics or a discrete card.

It's a dedicated graphics card. NVIDIA® GeForce® 310M GPU to be exact. 256 mb dedicated and it shares with the memory. I ran memtest86 so i doubt memory is the problem. And I've been using this memory for over a year now with no problems.