Windows 8.0 always freezing 5-10 minutes after boot

[Cedar Coast]

Hey all,

I have a lenovo y500 laptop with windows 8 that I've had for about six months now, which I've used lightly and been extremely careful with. However, lately when doing anything on it, about 5-10 minutes after boot it will just freeze using any program and most of the time I can't use ctrl+alt+del to get to the task manager because it won't let me. The times when I can open the task manager, it doesn't even matter because the task manager won't respond either. Only the mouse is still movable and it's stuck as a "loading circle". The only solution when this happens is to turn the laptop off by holding the power button. I tried multiple system restores to points quite far in the past, but to no avail. This started to frustrate me a lot, so after troubleshooting for a while I just decided to do a factory reset (reinstall windows) because I believed this was an OS problem. After the reinstall, this still kept on happening in the exact same manner, so I figured it was not an OS problem and thought it might be a hardware issue. Thinking it might be the hard drives, I used the windows error checking on the hard drives (both HDD and SSD in the laptop) and both produced no errors, although I do not know how thorough windows error checking is. I don't know whether this is a hardware or OS issue, I'd imagine it's hardware though since I did a clean reinstall of windows and it didn't work, but then again, I don't know to be honest. Can anyone give me some possible explanations/solutions, because this is a huge piss off considering I've kept the laptop in perfect condition for the short time I've had it. Also, I am willing to contact lenovo, but would prefer not to, since I've heard many horror stories about their customer service. If I could find a solution which I could perform, that would be best.

Thanks everybody


P.S. Sorry if I posted this in the wrong forum, it's my first post on this site and I figured posting this in the "Windows 8" forum would make the most sense.

 

[The_Prophecy]

Via my work, I deal with Lenovo Customer service quite a bit. We have 1000+ machines at the office, and I am usually the one who ends up calling when there is a problem). They aren't all that bad to deal with IMO. Only time it gets frustrating is when you run into a newly hired rep on the phone. I've had them tell me some pretty strange things haha.

This certainly seems like either an issue with the hard drive, or the system RAM. To check the RAM, download a copy of MemTest86+ and let it run for at least 3-4 hours.

 

[Cedar Coast]

Via my work, I deal with Lenovo Customer service quite a bit. We have 1000+ machines at the office, and I am usually the one who ends up calling when there is a problem). They aren't all that bad to deal with IMO. Only time it gets frustrating is when you run into a newly hired rep on the phone. I've had them tell me some pretty strange things haha.

This certainly seems like either an issue with the hard drive, or the system RAM. To check the RAM, download a copy of MemTest86+ and let it run for at least 3-4 hours.

Yeah I suspect it's the hard drive now too because when I've tried using my laptop lately I've been watching the performance section of the task manager. Coincidentally, all the hardware seems to be operating normally except for the hard drive. I'll be doing nothing at all and the read/write speeds will be off the wall. They bounce from 0% to 100% constantly, which seems extremely unusual. So I'll have to run an actual hard drive testing program ASAP. Thanks for helping me narrow it down.