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Laptop freezes unexpectedly but mouse still moves
The problem: My laptop will randomly freeze but I can still move my mouse around, however nothing responds or lights up when I click or hover over it with the mouse. The keyboard is also responding as the caps lock light will turn on and off, however the computer does not respond to it either. Also, all sound (my music or show that is playing) stops as well which is how I know it's not just a lag that will solve itself in a minute or so because the sound is not looping or buzzing strangely, it just cuts out completely. The only way to regain control is to force restart the laptop (I have tried walking away for an hour and nothing changed).
What is happening when the problem occurs: I have always been able to use my laptop to play a game (such as sims 3, age of empires, anno etc) and watch a show on my external monitor (either on VLC or streaming it using chrome) while many tabs of chrome are open and utorrent is downloading in the background. Now suddenly without warning it's like I have to tiptoe around my computer because it suddenly can't handle more than one of those processes at a time. Even then though, sometimes I'll get lucky because I decided to try playing a game again with chrome open in the background and it worked for quite a while. Other times I will have nothing but My Documents open and go to have dinner and come back half an hour later to find it frozen for no reason. So the problem is not limited to working the computer too hard but I honestly have no clue what the problem is related to.
What I did to try and fix it: Nothing has changed since this problem started, I haven't downloaded or installed or uninstalled anything. My laptop is 2 years old and about 6 months ago I completely wiped it and reinstalled windows to give it a fresh start. After the problem started I ran a full computer scan with AVG which found absolutely nothing, I downloaded CCleaner and cleared the registry and then checked my drivers for updates of which there were none. I then downloaded speedfan to monitor the temperature and found that the problem happens just as much when the laptop is 50-90 degrees celcius (I'm not entirely sure which reading I should be looking at; it gives me 4 different temperatures) as when it starts up for the first time in the morning at 25-50 degrees celcius.
Specs: I am running 64bit windows 7 on a 2-year-old dell inspiron N5110 with 8gbs of ram.
Last edited by krisztiana; 06 Nov 2013 at 10:06.
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