Computer freezes after idle time.

[HTML Document]

Hi, this happened out of the blue Thursday. When my Vista Home Premium-SP1,
is idle for awhile, the computer freezes... the screen is a grayish color and
the mouse circle just keeps twirling. I have to manually re-boot.
Everything is fine until I leave and come back...and it is frozen again. I
cannot ctrl-alt-delete either. When I went to do a system restore, I saw
that all my restore points were gone. How could this have happened? I
thought maybe a windows update could be the source so I uninstalled the many
updates ( approx. 25)....the next morning , I saw they had all returned even
though I have it set not to download automatically. I am hoping that someone
here has a solution for this bizarre behavior. Please help.
Thank you !!
Eileen

 

[Manny Weisbord]

Hi, this happened out of the blue Thursday. When my Vista Home Premium-SP1,
is idle for awhile, the computer freezes... the screen is a grayish color and
the mouse circle just keeps twirling. I have to manually re-boot.
Everything is fine until I leave and come back...and it is frozen again. I
cannot ctrl-alt-delete either. When I went to do a system restore, I saw
that all my restore points were gone. How could this have happened? I
thought maybe a windows update could be the source so I uninstalled the many
updates ( approx. 25)....the next morning , I saw they had all returned even
though I have it set not to download automatically. I am hoping that someone
here has a solution for this bizarre behavior. Please help.
Thank you !!
Eileen

Of course, you don't have any system backups to fall back on... right?

 

[HTML Document]

Hi Manny,
What do you mean by system backup? I back up my data files weekly...
Eileen

 

[Manny Weisbord]

Hi Manny,
What do you mean by system backup? I back up my data files weekly...
Eileen

You should have been using an imaging program such as Acronis True
Image to backup your entire system to either a second internal hard
drive or an external USB drive.

If you don't have that, you might be up that proverbial creek:

Other than that, I have no words of wisdom to offer you.

Sorry.

 

[HTML Document]

So what are you saying? My system didn't crash. It works fine...until it is
idle for an hour or two...then it freezes up. You are suggesting a system
failure....I don't have that ( I hope)

 

[Manny Weisbord]

So what are you saying? My system didn't crash. It works fine...until it is
idle for an hour or two...then it freezes up. You are suggesting a system
failure....I don't have that ( I hope)

I'm clueless about your problem.

System Restore takes care of a myriad of problems. It it's not
working, I don't know what to tell you.

I have used System Restore as a quick fix for many problems I've
caused over the years, and if that failed - which was seldom - I've
restored from my backups.

 

[HTML Document]

Thanks Manny, I googled this problem and I am not the only one....there are
thousands........I will keep looking..there is an answer somewhere I'm sure.
Eileen

 

[HTML Document]

I wonder if the following is the culprit:
The VSS service is shutting down due to idle timeout
This was in the Event Viewer just before the freeze.