Gateway ID59C Freezing Up Randomly

[binary01]

Hey there,

I bought a Gateway laptop in late november, and once I moved to school in January it started crashing, showing a bsod and restarting itself. I did system restores back to the factory settings as advised by the Gateway help line, and after two months of sending it back and forth to the repair center (and with four repairs saying there was nothing wrong with it) they sent me a replacement, which is the Gateway ID59C 03H. I promptly uninstalled Norton and installed Zone Alarm and AVG, along with firefox, picasa, gtalk and the like. It didn't take very long (a day or so) to start freezing similar to how my other laptop did. But in this case, the screen freezes and cursor disappears and I can't do anything. There's no bsod, and it doesn't restart itself. I have to force a restart by holding the power button. I've done a factory restore, and it still does the same thing. Can anyone help me with this? Is there something that I'm installing that's making my computers screw up? Any help is much appreciates!

 

[mgorman87]

First off check out this link Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) Posting Instructions.

Are you comfortable with doing a hard drive format and reinstalling windows? If you don't want to, do the tests below first and we'll go from there.

You can also try these diagnostic tests and report back

Do a Memtest86+ and run for at least 7 passes (6-8 hours): RAM - Test with Memtest86+
Do a sfc /scannow
Do a Disk Check
Lastly, run a HDD Test (using SeaTools)

 

[binary01]

Do a Memtest86+ and run for at least 7 passes (6-8 hours): RAM - Test with Memtest86+

Can you tell me where to go from here? I'm a little hesitant to be moving things around without knowing for sure what I'm doing! thanks!

It didn't want to boot from the memtest that I put on the dvd, so the tutorial said to move it to the top of the list, but I'm not sure which is which.

 

[mgorman87]

Have you had any change with your problem?

I appologize for not responding sooner. Your thread got burried.

To change the boot order to boot to a dvd hit F6 on the top device and then hit F10 to save it. You should then have your DVD as your first boot device. Let me know if that works

 

[binary01]

I found out that it was Zone Alarm that was not working with my computer. I was slowly installing programs and it froze after I installed that, so I'm using Comodo instead. No freezing for about a week! We'll see if that continues. Thanks for all your help!

 

[mgorman87]

Yea. Zone Alarm is known to cause problems with Windows 7. When I replied to your post originally I wasn't aware of that. Glad everythings working out for you.