System locks up forcing reboot

[zoeythecat]

Hi All,

Wondering if anyone has encountered this and if anyone has any suggestion.

A few workstations in our environment (3 laptops to be precise) that have WindowsXP Pro and connect to our network domain (my laptop being 1). A couple of times a day I will be in outlook, on the Internet, not doing anything out of the norm (these laptops our loaded with 512K RAM, P4 processor) all of a sudden the screen will freeze, you cannot click on anything, ALT+CTRL+DEL does nothing, wait for about 10 minutes to see if anything frees up, but nothing. The only option is to manually power off the laptop to reset it. If you have word documents open or excel, you will lose whatever info you have entered.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

TIA,
Zoey

 

[smah]

First, check the event viewer for errors. Start, Run, eventvwr.msc

 

[ato]

You need to go to control panel. Power option. select turn off monitor never, turn off hard disk never, system stand by never and system hibernate never. it will fix your problem.

 

[zoeythecat]

Thanks for your replies:

Smah,

The first thing I checked was Event Viewer. There is nothing there that relates. No warnings, etc.

Ato,

All the power management features were already set to "never". I know what you mean, these features can cause problems. I have had discussions with Dell so I already knew about having these disabled. But, even if these settings were enabled, these systems are getting hosed up while the end user (myself included) is working, not when the system is idle. So this is something different other than Power Management. What I don't know? Good suggestion though. If you can think of anything else let me know.

TIA,
Zoey

 

[smah]

If there's nothing in event viewer, my guess would be a hardware specific problem, like overheating, although it seems unlikely that 3 laptops would exhibit this behavior. Have you added anything common to these 3 machines - a cardbus NIC or docking station perhaps?

 

[Turkbear]

Another possiblilty is a loss of network connectivity to any mapped drives - XP will patiently try to restore the connections and may cause you to wait for a very long time befire it gives up because they are not available...

Just a thought..

 

[zoeythecat]

Smah,

On 2 of them we have wireless cards. This problem also started happening to me recently. Recently we upgraded our firewall and then reverted back. So maybe network problems with the firewall may be hosing it.

Turkbear,

Thanks for the thought.