Member Avatar for desantis191

Any help from fellow DaniWebers would be appreciated,
I have a 3 yr old Compaq V2000 laptop. I recently installed a new hard drive on it and decided to install Vista Ultimate. I formatted the disk from within the Vista install. Worked fine for short time. Now the thing randomly sits dormant, or freezes. I cannot do anything. I can see and move the mouse, but I cannot select or click on anything. Then after 30 seconds or longer, everything bounces back. It happens like every few minutes.
I turned off the Windows Aero look and feel, and turned off hibernation and sleep modes as I heard these 3 things COULD be the problem.
Still have the problem. I heard Vista was inferrior to XP Pro, but disregarded because I thought I wanted Vista. I liked the gadgets and was sold by the eye candy. Bad move! Should have went with Windows 7, but did not want to upgrade all my software! Argh!! Vista Utimate .... Ultimately Sucks!!
I also purchased 2 GB of RAM, but have run tests on it and it passes all tests.
Ran AVG Web security, no Viruses, no Adware, no Spyware.
HELP ME PLEASE.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by gurukid22

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A short, practical triage guide for the “mouse moves but UI is frozen” symptom on an older Compaq V2000. has already tried UI/power tweaks and correctly pointed to Event Viewer; the goal below is to isolate hardware (disk/firmware) from driver or service conflicts.

Start by correlating freezes with log entries. Check the System and Application logs and Reliability Monitor for entries at the exact freeze timestamps. Search for keywords such as “disk”, “ntfs”, “controller”, “timeout”, “display” or “faulting module.” Disk/controller errors often precede these stalls; common disk-related event IDs to watch for are 7, 11, 51 and 55, which usually indicate bad sectors, controller timeouts, I/O warnings or NTFS corruption. If those show up, run the drive manufacturer’s diagnostics and inspect SMART data.

Basic local checks to run from an elevated command prompt and with a bootable test are:

sfc /scannow
chkdsk C: /f /r

Also run a full Memtest86 pass (bootable) and the HDD maker’s offline utility. Booting from a Linux live USB or Windows PE and exercising the system for a while helps decide whether freezes happen outside Vista (hardware/firmware) or only under Vista (drivers/software).

If hardware tests pass, focus on firmware and drivers: get the chipset/SATA and video drivers from HP/Compaq’s V2000 support pages and consider a BIOS update only if the vendor’s notes mention stability or storage fixes. Use Safe Mode and a Clean Boot (msconfig disable non-Microsoft services/startup) to detect third-party conflicts; many OEM power-management or security suites cause intermittent hangs. When logs point to a specific driver or service, roll back or replace that component. The most common culprits on older laptops are failing drives, outdated SATA/chipset drivers, or aggressive OEM/security software, so prioritizing those saves time.

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Member Avatar for gurukid22

This is probably a problem with conflicting software or hardware, if the problem occured after you installed something like antivirus software this may be the conflicting application otherwise the only way you can find the problem would be to use the error logs.

Click start > right click my computer > select manage > click event viewer > start with the windows logs and see if there are logs that correspond to the time you had the problem look for red X's.

If you still ahve no luck format again backup your computer using Dmaielr Backup from or another free product first.

But this time dont install everything in one go try to see how long it works fin for and what application you install that causes the problem you can do this by installing one application per day.

Member Avatar for desantis191

good idea, totally did not think about te logs. I have not sen a bis issue since turnng off the aero theme stuff. But it still hangs on occassion. Next time it hic'ups I will note the time and search the logs.

Member Avatar for gurukid22

Interesting you mention that aero uses heaps of RAm maybe you dont have enought generally 2gb is enough but it depends the speed of the ram and what you are using the pc for.

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