How's it Hangin' ?!

I asked about this once or twice in the past, but never really got any resolution. Perhaps some fresh ears/eyeballs will have some better insight.

My XP routinely "hangs" over the dumbest things. Being ONLINE for example -- even w/o watching video or anything else, I can easily pin the laptop just by surfing. It seems to be a heat problem more than a RAM problem -- improved a bit by using chill pad -- but honestly, how can any PC be this bad?! I mean, 10 mins of surfing -- sites like google, hotmail, MG -- and it locks up for over an hour!

Worse yet, it takes the task manager down with it! As in, I can't get it open to kill off w/e I need to!!

My previous XP laptop had far fewer "hang" problems, but on the rare occasion that it did, I also had this "task manager impotent" issue. Not since the laptop before that one -- running 98 -- have I actually been able to kill off hanging programs.

BTW, there is not a lot of extraneous stuff running in the background. When the task manager FINALLY opens (40 mins to an hour and a half, usually), it's like iexplore 95%, and everything else 0 or 1. Or a big stack of svchost.exe entries. No obvious virus or malware type stuff (and I run all the usual for those anyways).

I have 512M RAM btw. Not the best...but not so piddly that I should be taking 1 hour "breaks" every 5th webpage!

 

The "iexplore 95%" stands out.
You might try disconnecting from the internet, running the machine through some stress tests to see if you can make it crash without being online.

 

It's very rare for the PC to lock up offline. Or even via dialup. Hence I originally thought I had mystery "tasks" (malware) going nuts every time I went wifi.

And even online, it's clearly BROWSER-related. I could run a zillion downloads, cute, irc, IM - w/e - and never run into this. But three tabs of IE (or FF or Opera, etc) googling and WHOA, NELLIE!

Funny, "alt-tab" continues to respond quite well, even while ^alt-del does nothing. And w/e other task I jump to is generally quite useable. Just not the browser.

Or at least THAT INSTANCE of the browser -- if I alt-tab back to explorer and open a SECOND ie (FF, Opera, etc), up it comes, healthy and new!! Even as the first one refuses to do ANYTHING.

Of course, at some LATER point, that one will inevitably lock up too, but for a while, it's like I've gotten a reprieve from the guv'nah.

:confused

BTW, lately I have noticed ONE exception to the "must be online" rule: my media players hang sumpin awful if I try to play anything labeled "HD". VLC, WMP, QT, it doesn't matter. They crash beyond repair. And take my task manager with them. Worse yet, unlike the "browser" issue, they take alt-tab and ALL OTHER APPS down with them as well.

OTOH, at least those crashes I can UNDERSTAND. Demands beyond my PC/RAM I guess. But 3 browser tabs quietly googling?!

Which brings us back to "stress tests". Specifics, please!

More importantly, is there any way to "boost" the task manager, so it becomes laptop priority #1 ?! Like it was back in Win98!!!!

TIA.

 

I assume it's zero -- or thereabouts -- but where exactly do I read it? Is it that second line under "physical memory" under Performance in the task mgr?

Bear in mind, tho, that by the time my task mgr reacts, the problem has somewhat abated. For example, that "CPU 95%" I cited below -- I assume it's more like 100% for the hour or so that my task manager won't respond. The fact that it finally does is perhaps indicative that the percentage has now DROPPED to 95....

Also, what is "commit charge"? I could never suss out what that's measuring. Even after reading the wiki!