Compac Presario 700Z laptop is "freezing" up

Hello,

I am trying to help a neighbor that has this laptop (more like a desktop replacement) as described above.
One thing I found was that she had two sticks of RAM installed and one is 128mg and the other 256mg. Could this cause unexplained freezing? My understanding is unless they are the same it could cause problems. Everything on the surface looks normal other than that. Once it's warm, it freezes. Do you think a "clean install" would help or does this sound like stictly a "Hardware" problem?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Note! this is a 3 to 4 yr old machine and it has an AMD '"Duron" mobile processor with a 30 gig hd that has more room than what's already used. It doesn't need a "defrag" either. That's about all I found out before it froze on me.

Thanks!

jnulr

 

You say once its warm it freezes, my first thought is over heating? maybe ya have some dust built up inside?

Ram? has a new stick just been added?
You can remove one stick or the other and see, or if you can, run a memory test.

Some programs could use a lot of resources & bog your system down.

 

ASUS,

No dust!

I did get Everest Home loaded and found "no conflicts" there. I believe there was a corrupted driver or system file but this gal that owns the laptop gave me her whole case and told me that was everything. Well, all it had was "Compac Recovery" disks with no XP disc. I really don't trust those and most of the time they don't work anyway but in this case they did! So, we're back up and runnnig once more and now I'm just making sure she has a solid system with the right utilities available for any problems in the future.

Do you happen to know if these kind of recovery disks actually do a "format"? Because of it's warnings, I assumed they do but I'll probably never know for sure. Bottom line is that we're working again and she'll be thrilled as it hasn't worked for her for over a year now. (What a shame eh?) Some "guru" gave here some bad advice which ultimately caused the problem.

Take care,

jnulr

 

I don't have restore disks from Compaq but formatted with XP home. Still freezes, weird. Any info would greatly help!
Rob

 

If it is freezing after new install, I would have to say that your motherboard is the culprit and overheating at the CPU. Only way to check, is to have the case taken off and look for clogged heatsinks.

 

Thank you, As I remember, I needed the original CD to re install correct drivers to not freeze. BTW how do I change my username on here?