Inspiron 1150 freezing

My daughter's complained that her laptop freezes intermittently & now she's home for Xmas I can see the problem for myself. Its just locked up completely, running IE - just clicked on a link in e-bay & the first green bar has just appeared at the bottom. The screen is completely frozen, no BSOD, needs powering down to reboot. Its a Dell inspiron 1150 XP sp2

She had windows task manager running & this is still visible on the screen showing
24% CPU usage & 260 MB PF usag
Totals: Handles 10264 threads 612 processes 58
Commit charge: Total 266860 Limit 1278932 Peak 267280
Physical mem: Total 522580 Available 226140 System Cache 231776
Kernal mem: Total 33548 paged 23504 nonpaged 10044
& we both think the fan is more noisy than usual, if that's any clue.

Thanks for any help you can give, Dave

 

Started up the pc again & downloaded the sensor which shows HD0: 28C

Then went back to the same link off e-bay as before & it froze at exactly the same place (and a few seconds later the fans started whirring loudly again). She says its most often a web page link that causes the freeze, sometimes from an Amazon e-mail. The same link off my home pc works fine. Both machines have firewalls & antivirus software.

I think it must be something in software causing the problem. I'll read through the link you sent. And maybe try closing down one thing at a time before trying the link to narrow down what's triggering it.

Thanks, Dave

 

The cpu is 62C. F-secure is fully up-to-date & she also runs "Ad-aware SE personal" & "Spybot - Search & Destroy" - so far we've not had time to run all the malaware checks.

Right now we've got the task manager open on processes & are clicking on exactly the same links as before .... and everything's working perfectly. Strange.

Dave

 

Hmmm 62C Isn't really high.. It's a little higher than average but still within working capabilities, so I doubt it's a temperature problem.

 

It froze again & I can't see anything helpful in the task manager:
iexplore.exe Ruth 48
System Idle Process SYSTEM 38
Fssm32.exe SYSTEM 05
Taskmgr.exe Ruth 04
Teatimer.exe Ruth 02
Csrss.exe SYSTEM 02
System SYSTEM 01
BackWeb-768119… Ruth 00
The event viewer only had one (successful) record timed before the reboot. BackWeb-738119... showed up as an application error but that turned out to be "a known bug in F-secure that doesn't affect the program". And there was a Rasman system warning.

 

Update:
Temperature checked out at 62C and I worked my way through the malaware checks is "READ & RUN ME FIRST Before Asking for Support"

Then the pc locked up again on a random hyperlink (nothing special). The only thing I've seen this happening on over Xmas is in internet hyperlinks, though my daughter thinks its happened using Word at Uni (she's not sure).

There were no clues in the event viewer.

Any bright ideas? Thanks, Dave