Computer Locking Up After Windows Xp Boots

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Hey can anyone help!

My computer keeps locking up shortly after Windows XP boots up. About a minute or 2 after Windows XP boots up my computer locks up and I can't do a thing. What I mean is the computer is frozen. The mouse will not move and the computer will not respond to the keyboard. Anyone with any suggestions would really help a lot.

Thanks !

Professor Falken

 

Hey all...could this be a overheating CPU???? Just a thought...

 

I wonder how long this has been happening and if he maybe did a windows update today.

 

Thats a good point Mitzs.

Have you tried rolling it back to a restore point?

What did you do between when it was okay and now?

Pete

 

How about booting to safe mode and seeing if the prob persists - any new drivers added ?

 

I had a similar problem a while back. I put XP Home on an oldish computer, it was a Pentium 2, 128mb RAM. It was just for doing typing and stuff, so with just office or something open it trundled along with no problems. I decided to hook it up to the web one day. I already had Panda Antivirus on it, and it was running ok. I downloaded the Sygate free firewall and installed it. Did a reboot and got the same thing you describe. As if got near the end of the start-up sequence the whole thing would just freeze up. Nothing would work. I rebooted a few times, always the same result. I went in to safe mode and removed the firewall, and it was back to normal, and still works fine to this day. I can only think that XP, Antivirus and Firewall were too much for it to handle. Have you added any software recently to your machine ?

 

XP comes with it own firewall and I belive by default is set to on. Did you turn off MS firewall first? Just curious.

 

well by default its off until you get SP2, so if you recently installed SP2 it might of borked
if its an unprotected machine directly connected to the net then the firewall will be processing a whole lot of junk and dropping packets left right and center, thus slowing the machine down (if ofcourse, its a slow machine)

 

Hmmm, don't know why I thought the default was on, but thanks for the heads up Phoenix.

 

I recently upgraded my laptop to XP SP2 and Zone Alarm and the XP firewall would fight for dominance when I booted the machine. I finally had to turn both off so they wouldn't load a boot and I just turn ZA on afterwards.

 

When I installed ZoneAlarm it disabled Windows Firewall itself (or Windows detected it & turned itself off).
I've not had any problems with it

 

Good point actually - I recently reloaded ZA Pro (was previously using XP f/w) alongside AVG7Free. System was fine until the first reboot - then it locked like a stone, every time. Uninstalled ZA, re-instated XP f/w and instantly all was well.

Just a thought.

 

I ran Norton Antivirus from safe mode and the computer locked
up during the scan.

I read the messages posted and I do have zone alarm installed on my computer. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!


Thanks

Professor - Falken!

 

Uninstall ZA and switch on Windows firewall, just to see - if nothing else, it will rule out a conflict there.

 

That not good if it locked up running nortons. I have seen that happen before at school and it usually some kind of virus. When this did happen we would download a free 30 day copy of f-prot burn it to a cd and run it on the computer. I'm not sure if yours has a virus or not but I would give it a try.

 

Prof, can you actually tell us which, if any, of the above you have tried so far, in order that we can perhaps narrow the areas of search to try and help you with this ?

Thanks

 

Couple of things. I recall one of the suggestions was restoring your computer to a point in time when it was working fine using a Restore Point. You could also try disabling Zone Alarm and seeing if that's the problem.

 

This is what I have tried so far.


Running Norton Antivirus from Safemode.

Will Try Next:

1. Restore point.
2. Disable Zonealarm.