Freeze Problem
 

My mother's laptop, Sony Vaio with XP Home randomly freezes about twice a day. This isn't a Ctrl+Alt+Del freeze, you have to turn off the computer to go back. She has called VAIO support and they were of no use, and we have reformatted the computer twice and that has not helped out at all.

Any possible solutions all?

Unfortunately due to the warranty restrictions with opening up a labtop, hardware malfunctions are best left to just send it back to sony and have them fix it.

Not much else I can say, you've pretty much done everything I'd do to try and fix it.

Without any more info to go on, freezes like that, in my experience, are most often bad RAM or a bad video card/driver. Do get a bluescreen?? Or does it just freeze.

You can test the memory with memtest86:
http://www.memtest86.com/

It will create a bootable floppy for ya. You shouldn't see any errors.

Or load up the Vaio support page at http://ciscdb.sel.sony.com/perl/select-p-n.pl

and hit the auto-detect option, see if there's any hardware diagnostics you can download. They could very well have updated drivers too.


Is the laptop new? See if it's still under warranty and have it RMA'ed if so!