Seattle Laptop, The Laptop Experts! Over 50,000 Laptops Serviced!

Laptop Repair - Laptop Freezes

Laptop Freezing Problem Repair : If your laptop turns on, but freezes randomly, occasionally, or constantly Seattle Laptop may be able to help. Unfortunately it may be difficult to determine what the actual problem is in many cases though. This is true with most "random" problems.

One of the most common problems for a laptop to start freezing is from overheating. Few laptop users have developed the habit of having their laptop's cooling system serviced on a regular basis, and when lint builds up on a laptop's heat sink the fan can not properly cool the machine. If a laptop overheats repeatedly this can also cause permanent damage. Cleaning the heat sink, and then reseating the processor, and replacing the thermal grease may help, or cure the problem in most cases.

Another reason for a laptop to randomly freeze is corruption of the operating system. Depending on how bad the operating system problem is, Seattle Laptop can usually repair it. One of the ways we test for this problem, if we can't locate any other obvious problem is to install a test hard drive, load Windows on it, and see if this cures the problem of freezing. Troubleshooting random problems is very hard, and this is the only sure way to rule out software, and hard drive problems. Unfortunately this does take some time, and labor.

Quite often we find a laptop's ram chip may have failed, and causes a customer's laptop to not turn on, or behave strangely. We often replace the ram for testing purposes to see if this cures the poblem.

A problem causing laptops to randomly freeze we see quit often is a system board problem we call "ram slots". The socket where the ram chips are installed have hundreds of tiny pins soldered to a laptop's system board, and we have seen hundreds of laptops where one of the ram slots was "bad". Removing one ram chip cured the problem. Unfortunately when a ram slot goes bad, all too often the other slot, which is deteriorating at the same rate may also go bad. Re soldering ram slots is possible, but is extremely difficult. We have had a fair amount of succes doing this type of repair however.

A problem we see more and more causing laptops to freeze, or shut off is a video card failure on the system board. Many different makes and models develop known video card problems after being used for a period of time. Some manufacturers even have extended warranties on their laptops because a large number of them have had video card, or northbridge chip failures. If you suspect your laptop has a video card problem, and it is less than two years old, you may want to check with the manufacturer, and see if it has an extended warranty. Many HP laptops have had warranties extended by an extra year.

Listed above are some of the more common problems that cause laptops to randomly freeze, blue screen, or shut off, or reboot. There are other problem, like loose components, and loose connections, and the list goes on.

We hope our customers keep in mind how difficult it is to troubleshoot "random" problems. We test a laptop thoroughly, and many times we don't find the "smoking gun" that is obviously causing the problem. We use our years of experience, and repair the most likely cause, and then test laptops further. We hope our customers understand that repairing random problems can sometimes be truly impossible without replacing expensive components, like system board. We do our best.