5 Common causes of lockups & solutions

Your computer was working fine, but then suddenly started locking up (freezing), rebooting itself (crashing) or shutting down spontaneously? If you know only too well what I am talking about, then read on! Performing the simple steps below can fix the majority of lockup cases.

Check for recently installed software or hardware.

If the lockups started to happen after you installed a new peace of hardware, new software program, or new drivers, uninstall it and see if the problem goes away.

Check for free hard drive space.

When no viruses are found, check out free hard drive space on drive C:. Make sure there is more than 20% of free space available; low disk space can lead to random lockups.

Check for overheating.

Overheating is another known cause of lockups. It can be caused by problems with fans inside the case, dust buildup, or other cooling problems. Make sure the power supply fan and CPU fan are running and free of dust buildup.

Check the hard disk.

Check the hard disk – it is possible that its logical structure is corrupted.

Check the memory.

Sometimes random lockups can be attributed to the computer memory (RAM) starting to fail. You can test the memory by running Windows Memory Diagnostic that can be downloaded from http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp.

The above steps will help diagnose and eliminate the common causes of lockups. Hundreds more of other possible scenarios need to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Bring your computer into one of our Computer services centres, our expert technicals can identify and solve of the problems.