a compaq presario cq60 was given to me a couple months ago; nothing fancy. its had some hiccups, but welcome to vista, right?

what seems to be a recurring theme with it, however, is freezing when i close a program. generally the only one i end via process is firefox when it starts running 300 or more mb ram. for some reason, it causes the whole system to lock up for several minutes. music/video hangs and loops whatever syllable it last played. even the mouse freezes. sometimes i get tired of waiting and do a hard reboot.

this happens with other programs, too - itunes, msn/yahoo messengers, etc. the most recent occurrence was with firefox. i manually closed each open window without problem. the Downloads window was last and running at 250mb ram. when i closed it, the computer locked up for 6 minutes.

is there something obvious i should be seeing? perhaps if i knew more about heaps and threads, id be able to see the issue before making the mistake of closing the wrong window.

its intermittent, but still fairly common.

any tips?

Simply put, time to upgrade RAM and if possible, upgrade to a hard-drive with better write speed. Freezing is simply a sign that have not got sufficient memory resources for the job.

BTW, blaming Vita for everything is getting rather old. HP (who own Compaq) have long been known for loading up their computers with legacy components, even more so in their budget range - ie, Compaq.

i'll cede that no one knows when an HD will start to decline, but despite part of the memory address space being reserved in 32 bit systems, why is what remains (of a 3gb starting space) insufficient to do a simple task like closing a program? especially when sometimes it has this problem and sometimes it doesnt

and i dont blame vista for everything. there is a lot i really like, and a lot i really dont. vista works great for people who understand more than the first 20 layers of computers and are able to solve threads like mine. those who only understand the first 15 or so have to take it day by day.