Michael T. said:
Those are some good suggestions Stef. Thank you.
The fact that it only happens when my laptop has been shut off overnight
certainly does nothing to dissuade me from considering your suggestion that
it might be a hardware problem. BTW, after the second boot in the morning
and left running all day there are no apparent further problems.
Those could also indicate software: I presume when you say "only ...
when ... has been shut off" that you normally don't, so it could be
something that only runs at cold boot.
I like your suggestion to disable services in baby steps as opposed to
disabling all of them at once.
A binary search would be quicker - i. e. disable half of them, then
re-enable those and disable the other half, then once you've decided
which half it's in, do half of _those_ ... however, (a) given the
intermittent nature of the fault this could _still_ take approaching
forever (though be quicker than doing just one at a time), (b) I share
the view of the other poster that disabling startups via MSconfig is a
bit of a last resort.
If you do try it (the binary search), though, do make note of which ones
you are and are not disabling - I wouldn't be surprised if msconfig
presents them in a varying order (at least if you've changed their
enabled status), so assuming "the first half" may not work!
I have a bootable CD with a memory test ready to go the next time I'm away
from the computer for at least an hour -- like a trip for groceries. (I'm
retired and usually home all day.)
Glad that proved not to be the problem.
I agree with your comment that, "It could be the boot process is waiting for
something that is not ready, or broken, etc." This is problematic in that so
far I have not been able to determine what is happening when it freezes.
Is the disc light on or off when it freezes? Any other lights (wireless
maybe?) tell you anything? (_Does_ a ctrl-alt-del not work?)
I hope it's not the HD (
http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm
will let you look at the SMART data fairly effortlessly - other such
utilities exist), though given the rarity and specificity (?), it seems
unlikely.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf
"The wish of the lazy to allow unsupervised access [to the internet] to their
children should not reduce all adults browsing to the level of suitability for
a
five-year-old." Yaman Akdeniz, quoted in Inter//face (The Times, 1999-2-10):
p12