Windows 7 freezing on HP 630

[justdandythanks]

Here's one I hope someone can help me with. It seems that seven freezing occupies a substantial part of this forum but I cant find anything to help me solve my problem. My wife's laptop started freezing a few weeks ago(keyboard gets red card and leaves the field and mouse goes on strike too). Now uinlike most of the freeze problems on this forum, I still occasionally have programs running in the background(I noticed this while downloading latest drivers with DAP which continued without a bump until the download had completed and still opened a new window asking me if I would like to run the app etc). I as per usual had to switch the machine off and on to get it running again. Sometimes pushing the power button briefly, thereby sleeping the machine, then pressing to wake up is enough to get the ball rolling again but it often comes down to complete power-down/power-up.

The problem started occuring more and more frequently until the machine was barely running for more than 3minutes a time and occasionally didnt make it from boot to login. This screamed hardware to me(I may be wrong as I've been out of IT for over 10 years) so I started all the usual diagnostics which all passed consistently. I have an identical machine and was tempted to start part swapping but decided to leave that until I'd covered the drivers, etc. I checked the Event Viewer and discovered no really informative logs as the recording always seemed to stop a few minutes before the laptop froze. There was almost always an event 41 immediately after restart but I figure this is from forcing power-down! I updated the BIOS to the latest version 33 then did my utmost best to find the latest version of every driver on the machine. I updated the Realtek Audio driver, Intel HD graphics driver, Hard disk Driver etc. (Í'm not to sure I have all the latest drivers as I ran Radar sync which listed driver versions that neither Microsoft, HP nor Intel have listed on their support sites so I chose the latest drivers between the three sites).
I ran the machine in Safemode with Network suport to download and update the drivers and becoming a little impatient loaded two or three drivers at a time before restarting in normal mode to test and the machine never skipped a beat while in Safemode.

Now comes the interesting part: I loaded the the Realtek Audio driver and restarted the machine. It froze almost as soon as windows opened and I pulled the power cable and got into bed to continue on battery power. On restart I double checked my drivers and got a few messages that the drivers had not properly installed so re-installed the affected ones. The machine ran in normal mode perfectly for a good five hours (compared to the usual few minutes) and I believed the problem to be solved.The battery was low so I plugged the power cable in to recharge the laptop for my wife and the machine froze instantly! I tested the machine with and without the main power plugged in and the result is the same. Each time the main power is plugged in everything goes south! There is no predicting how long it will run before crashing as it can be anything from 1 second to a few minutes but it never crashes on battery power. I've played around with the power profiles a bit matching the battery profile with the mains-power profile ánd visa-verse but nothing changes the end result.

I dont know if there is any relevance in this but my wife with her sharper eye sight pointed out that when the main power is plugged in, moving images on the screen start to wobble slightly shortly before the machine freezes. I could comprehend this being a power or PSU issue on a desktop machine but with the AC/DC converter and battery between the raw power and and the guts of the machine I feel this shouldnt be a problem (though I'll stand to be corrected). To be on the safe side, I have so far swapped power cables between my laptop and the problematic one but swapping the batteries seems a long shot to me and I have a nagging feeling that I'm being side tracked.

One thing common to other issues on this forum is an occasional loud buzzing sound from the speakers when the machine hangs(the screen goes black when and only when the buzz occurs) but this is rare. Other than that there is no BSOD and I have almost no common hardware with most machines mentioned in the forum.

One thing I havent done yet is reinstall windows. The relation between the main power cable and the crashes makes me feel that it would be a waste of time but I was an IT techy back when CPU's were shipped to clients on flat-bed trucks. I need help!:sarc:

 

[writhziden]

Thank you for the detailed response. Have you tried: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...ation-conflicts-performing-clean-startup.html

If that does not help narrow it down, please follow the http://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-debugging/96879-blue-screen-death-bsod-posting-instructions.html to provide us with the Event Viewer logs, system logs, programs installed, services running, etc. That information can be helpful when dealing with freezing as well as blue screen crashes, so we recommend it for any type of crash/freeze scenario.

 

[justdandythanks]

@writhziden. Thank you for your reply. I'll give it a bash.

 

[writhziden]

You're welcome. Let us know as you go.