Troubleshooting Dell Inspiron 6400 Vista Lockups

[wolram]

I have a Dell inspiron 6400 running vista, on a lot of sites it will lock up, ctr, alt , del doe's
nothing, and it will not power down, the only way i clear this is by taking the batteries out,
i do this and she starts up no problem.
I have run virus checks but none have been found, could this be hardwear prob?
Thanks for any help.

 

[Borek]

Glad to see you on line

Next time check if just pressing the on switch for a few seconds won't restart it.

It can be anything. Check if the same happens with other browsers.

 

[wolram]

Glad to see you on line

Next time check if just pressing the on switch for a few seconds won't restart it.

It can be anything. Check if the same happens with other browsers.

Thanks Borek.

I have tried button pressing, un installed/ re installed firefox, still the same as with IE,
although it seems to happen less often now.

 

[PerennialII]

Most lock - up issues have had with Dell laptops have had to do with display drivers. With my current precision the latest nvidia drivers (177.82) provided the relief (before them had about a lockup / week, now about 1 / 2 months). Often they arise with browsers, and one old trick was to turn off "advanced" features such as smooth scrolling (which for some reason was a big issue for 173 drivers and could always lock the thing up). So without knowing much about your hardware would 1st make sure the display driver is up to date, next probably make sure flash plugin is up to date or disable it and see if it makes a difference. In my case a hard power - off was the way to turn the laptop off (pressing the power button like 5 secs or something). Also running diagnostics with the dell diagnostics utility / CD to check for hardware issues is probably a good idea.

 

[wolram]

Thanks Perennial, at least i have some things to look for now.

 

[mgb_phys]

My vote would be for graphics drivers, my laptops freezes coming out of standby with the latest drivers.
A good test for potential HW problems is to download one of the live-cd Linux distributions, like Ubuntu. Boot from the CD and see if that works, if it does then it's a software problem. They also generally have a memtest boot which is worth running if you have intermittent problems.