Fed up with Windows XP freezing. There you are using one of your programs on your PC or laptop and then suddenly it slows to a crawl or maybe stops altogether.
A lots of advice is given about windows xp freezing from all around good or bad to no avail. Eventually you may give up and reboot the PC maybe losing all your work. Unfortunately the computer industry lives on all the wrong advice and the just don’t know syndrome.
There are several things you can do to maybe stop your windows xp freezing or to get it going again, clear up your computer and get it back to its best performing position. Some I have written about in my blog that should be performed regularly but the ones I am going to describe below are those when you suddenly get windows xp freezing and hitting a slow spell on your PC.
First the windows operating system is getting more and more complex, multiple programs can be run simultaneously one that may be causing your computer to freeze up and slow down. So lets see how we can find these stuck programs and get rid of them.
On Windows XP (and Vista), press Ctrl+Shift+Esc, which will bring up the Windows xp Task Manager. It will normally come up with the “Applications” tab showing. Under this tab you will find a list of all the programs you are running at this time. Select each one in turn (excepting the one you are working with that has slowed down) and at the bottom of the “Windows Task Manager” click the “end task” button. If the program fails to stop do not worry just go to each of the others and stop them. If they all close go back to the program you are using and see if it has got out of its malaise.
If your program is still slow or windows xp freezing is still evident go back to the “Windows XP Task Manager” and select the “Processes” Tab. You will now see a list of all the programs running on your PC. Click on the “CPU” column this will sort the CPU “usage” in descending order if it doesn’t click the CPU column again.
View the CPU usage column for a while and watch to see if any program is using a high percentage of CPU time. Basically if you are doing nothing the only high usage should be the System Idle Process”
If you find another program that is consistently using a high percentage of CPU time then it is possible that this is a hung program and is the one causing your windows xp freezing problem. It is also possible that it may be the program you are using.
Just click on the process that is using a high level of CPU time and then the “End Process” button at the bottom of the “Windows XP Task Manager” window. Note this will instantaneously shut down the application and you will not be able to save any files that may have been open.
Windows keeps a log of just about everything that happens on your computer and is a good way of possibly finding what programs constantly cause problems on your PC. You may not understand everything contained in the log but you may get some useful hints at what is causing you problems. It certainly may give some indication on what is causing your windows xp freezing problem.
To view the system log, go to Control Panel. (Start > settings > Control panel) If it says “switch to classic view” in the left column, click that. Then click “administrative tools” and then “event viewer”. When the event viewer opens, select “Application” or “System” from the column on the left. You can then scroll down the log and look for warnings (yellow exclamation mark) or errors (red cross). Double-clicking on one of these entries will show you the detail of the error. The contents may not mean much to you but you can search for the error wording on Google to find out what other people did to stop it from happening again.
Another area of slow downs of PC’s is “Free Apps” Some major computer makers love to load up their computers with “free” software. This free software can be most annoying as it keeps bothering you to subscribe to the full version and may slow your computer down if it auto-loads at startup. These free programs can even conflict with new programs you have installed, again causing your windows xp freezing problem. These are sometimes of such an annoyance that many specialized programs have been developed to help you delete free trials and other rubbish that comes on your computer.
Another annoyance are some security suites that really get their roots deep into the core of Windows XP. At least one is usually loaded as a free trial when you buy your new computer. If you have decided to use a different security suite (Virus, spyware etc) you need to get rid of the current one and preferably before you install your preferred one. Symantec makes a special tool to delete all versions of its Norton security suites (tinyurl.com/killnorton), as does McAfee (tinyurl.com/killmcafee) and Zone Alarm (download available at tinyurl.com/killzonealarm). You can find removal tools for other security suites by Googling the brand to find the removal tool”.
If your hard drive is almost full, although it may not actually cause the windows xp freezing problem it can dramatically slow down your computer, because when your computer runs out of its high-speed memory for running software, it has to start using the hard drive as memory. If the computer has plenty of free space, it can use large continuous blocks of space for this “swap” memory. However, if the hard drive is very full, the computer has to hunt for vacant blocks of space to use this can take some time slowing your PC.
Sometimes, there are huge amounts of space taken up on your hard drive by things like downloaded movies, MP3 music and so forth that you’ve watched, listened and forgotten about. Removing them can see great speed improvements. Disk space analyzers do a great job of showing the biggest files on your disk and helping you delete them (be careful what you delete). On Windows, WinDirStat works well doing this. You can download it free from: http://windirstat.info/
If you continue to have a windows xp freezing problem I suggest you read through all the other articles I have written on the windows slow problem on the rest of my blog.