What causes my computer to freeze up?

Didn’t you open the Windows Task Manager when you did the Ctrl+Alt, Delete?

It could be many things.

Do you ‘clean up’ your system periodically with a program such as CCleaner? When was the last time you defragged the hard drive? Are you using multiple applications that use a lot of memory? Have you tried rebooting?

What @FutureMemory says ^ ^ CCleaner rocks and usually solves log jams in a jiffy.

I’ve done the usual stuff….have Spyware…did that…went to tools and deleted history etc. It’s set to do defrag….everyday i think. Now, it’s great….fast etc. But, for about 15 minutes every morning…have this. Been doing this for a longtime… I’ve thought about CCleaner Cruiser. @FutureMemory that I don’t know.

Do you have any everyday scheduled—defrag? ? ? EVERYDAY

Look up scheduled items .. . .

@Tropical_Willie i’m almost sure i do….check that a while ago and it does…that could be it. It is great now…

Kill some of your startup programs. You have something that’s going on line to update itself and is basically locking you out of your own computer because it wants resources.

Get this. It will tell you about absolutely everything that starts with your computer, where it starts from, and who owns it. It also allows you to disable automatic starting of any offending program. Antivirus suites are the chief culprits, but there are so many apps that want to go on line as soon as you boot up that you can’t even work sometimes. Got AIM? Kill it. Yahoo applications? Kill them. Kill everything you don’t absolutely need to have running. You should be in control of when they can talk to their update servers, not them.

@IchtheosaurusRex wow…got’cha!

It sounds like you have a program that updates each morning at about the same time. go to the Task Manager and see what programs you have that are scheduled to begin at this same time. some anti-virus programs do this everyday.

Thank you John…. I downloaded @IchtheosaurusRex‘s program…did wonders!

John, when you go into Task Manager and click on processes..there are many. How would you know which one to delete? I’ve always been scared to delete anything.

@BoBo1946 Glad to hear you’re getting on top of it. Too many things in the startup menu is often the cause of such headaches. Seems every new piece of software these days wants to install itself in the startup menu. At some poing, it just breaks the back of available memory.or sets up resource conflicts. Keeping it clean and lean is the right way to go.

@ETpro got’cha my friend! Thank you and have a great weekend! I’m going to the Alabama-Ole Miss game…ummm….bet they beat up on my Rebels after last week…

I know my laptop is a little slow to start up because I have quite a few things going on all at once, especially Avira trying to update before my wifi is even fully connected to my router. That generally pegs both cores of my CPU at 95–100% for about two minutes as it tries to sort through everything. However, it doesn’t slow down after that unless I keep it on long enough to have stuff try to update again or unless one of my security programs decides to do a sweep in the background.

One thing that happens to a lot of people is that they run out of memory and have to start flogging the Virtual Memory which is about 1,000 times slower. My laptop has 3GB of RAM and my desktop has 6GB so I personally have not had that problem on these computers, but a lot of people with older computers that have 2GB or less run into it quite a bit and anybody with 1GB or less running any software made in the last 10–15 years (like any version of Windows after Win95) runs into it as soon as they boot up.

Bad memory modules are uncommon, but I have had a couple of situations where a bad DIMM caused issues as soon as the memory filled up to a certain point. I have also had a few throttle down the CPU due to overheating when the heat sink was clogged with cat hair or I just didn’t give my computer enough ventilation.