Hi all,

My Dell laptop has been crashing for a while. Even when not doing anything remotely strenuous, the mouse will stop moving and nothing will work, and the laptop needs restarting. Sometimes it will happen 4-5 times a day, sometimes it won’t happen for a few weeks.

I recently had the mother-board replaced (for another issue), but this has not stopped the crashing. Any ideas what it could then be due to?

Ta,
Duane.

Memory or driver.

Indeedy, re-installing you OS a fresh would be a good place (& free), if slightly painful, to start with. Shouldn’t be the O/S but it takes one variable out of the equation.

Though lots of memory test utilities are available to try also, so also worth trying too.

PS: I’d normally suggest it maybe some-sort of heat induced issue but ‘assume’ (rightly or wrongly) that the cooling system was attached to the mobo and so shouldn’t be full of dust & that fans are working and the cpu was covered with fresh heat transfer paste.

Could well be the memory. Run a memory test, or take each stick out in turn and see if it fixes the problem.

Memtest+ for starters.

Vents clear, fan turning freely, etc?

i have some experience with pcs and my first thought was heat. Was the fan replaced at the same time as the mobo? and if so was it strong enough?