Great ideas if he can see them when the problem occurs. +1

HTH,

Twayne`


n ,
Stefan Patric typed:
On Thu, 25 Nov 2010 09:30:59 +0000, Mervyn Thomas wrote:

I am getting, several times a week, situations when the PC
totally freezes with no input via the mouse or keyboard
but with the screen just as it was before the freeze.
Powering down fixes it. Can anyone advise how to go about
identifying and fixing the problem?

It could caused by a runaway process. Such an errant
process hogs the CPU preventing it from updating the
system, keyboard, mouse, etc. in a timely manner, and thus
gives the appearance that the computer is frozen or locked
up.

What applications are you running and what are doing when
the "freeze" happens? Does the freeze occur under the same
circumstances? What other tasks are running in the
background?

Try running the Task Manager (ctrl-alt-del to access it).
Place it on the desktop so that it is visible at all times.
When the freeze occurs, check it to see if any process or
task is using 100% of the CPU's time. Give it time to
update. If the cause is a runaway process, it may take
several seconds to minutes to update.

Stef