HP Pavillion DV7 Notebook PC
Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q9000 at 2GHz (64-bit)
6.00 GB RAM
64-bit Vista Home Premium SP1



I am a computer application programmer and have a lot of experience with XP, but mostly as a user. This is my first Vista machine and I have little experience with Vista, but I can find my way around it...eventually. (I'm used to finding configuration options in XP and have to search a little to find the equivalent option in Vista.)

Quite frequently, when I am using my machine, it goes into an "unresponsive" or "thrashing" state. By this I mean the hard drive light goes on continuously, and some or all all running applications become unresponsive (they don't respond to clicks and keypresses, eventually showing "Not Responding" in the title bar). Usually Explorer and the task bar and start menu remain functional but sometimes I get the spinning ring of death. Control-Alt-Delete causes the screen to go black for a few minutes before the prompt comes up.

Sometimes this happens with the Task Manager open. Sometimes Task Manager becomes unresponsive too, but when it doesn't it appears to show only 30% processor usage, and only about 2Gb of RAM are in use.

The most frequent program I use when not programming is Windows Live Mail, and the problem seems to crop up when I'm reading and browsing e-mails, and Windows Live Mail seems to be the first to exhibit the problems, but that's probably coincidence.

No error messages. Is there a system log that I should be looking at?

Sometimes in Task Manager I've seen WERfault.exe running - does this mean a background process is crashing? How can I get more info on that?

The problem started soon after I got the machine. The first time it cropped up, I turned off SuperFetch and the problem seemed to disappear for a few days, but after a windows update, the problem returned just as bad as before.

The machine never totally hangs -- if I wait around for a few minutes, eventually it finishes whatever was tying it up and all applications become responsive again. But this occurs quite frequently, 5-10 times per hour, and thus it is very hard to get work done.

I

hi and welcome to vista forums

there is a seen problem with svchost.exe spiking causing high cpu spikes and hangs. You might want to watch next time it happens and if nec kill the offending process. there is a fix on the interweb, just nodt remember what it is.

Check it out

Originally Posted by zigzag3143

I

hi and welcome to vista forums

there is a seen problem with svchost.exe spiking causing high cpu spikes and hangs. You might want to watch next time it happens and if nec kill the offending process. there is a fix on the interweb, just nodt remember what it is.

Check it out

zigzag,

I stated in my post that the CPU use is still reasonable when this happens, and there are no svchost.exe processes with high usage in task manager.

Originally Posted by lemur

we have to figure out what is causing the problem and not just mask it.

Collecting User-Mode Dumps (Windows)

Should I get full dumps or minidumps?

Originally Posted by Inadvertently

Originally Posted by zigzag3143

I

hi and welcome to vista forums

there is a seen problem with svchost.exe spiking causing high cpu spikes and hangs. You might want to watch next time it happens and if nec kill the offending process. there is a fix on the interweb, just nodt remember what it is.

Check it out

zigzag,

I stated in my post that the CPU use is still reasonable when this happens, and there are no svchost.exe processes with high usage in task manager.

Yep saw it the first time. if cpu and ram are "reasonable" whats causing the freeze. the spinning circle of death is the "busy" icon. If you are busy the computer is telling to wait so it can catch up.

Another symptom I forgot to mention before. Sometimes when I press ctrl-alt-delete to get the task manager, I get "Login process has failed to create the security options dialog" / "Failure - Security Options"

Googling this I find accusations against various antivirus programs, disk drivers, power supply, system file corruption, hard failure (need a SMART utility), a corrupted sidebar (I'm not using one), Java, the conficker worm, readyboost, overheating

Running

sfc /scannow

yields

"Windows resource protection could not start the repair service"

yet both the Windows Installer service and Windows Module Installer service are started.

Holding down F8 does not put the computer into safe mode. I had to use msconfig to set safe mode and then restart. In safe mode sfc /scannow works.

Originally Posted by lemur

Originally Posted by Inadvertently

Originally Posted by lemur

we have to figure out what is causing the problem and not just mask it.

Collecting User-Mode Dumps (Windows)

Should I get full dumps or minidumps?

Gimme what ya got. Ken, we can analyze these and figure what going on - hopefully...

Lemur

The link just drops on an MS page on how to collect dumps