HDX 18t Freezing Regularly

[badgerfan92]

I bought a HDX 18t in mid-April.  It was running Vista 64bit just fine for a couple weeks but then blue screened while I was working on an Excel document.  At first the laptop didn't even recognize the hard drive, but after powering it all the way down, the hard drive was finally found.  After all the Vista recovery processes ran, the laptop was finally able to boot up again.  Once it booted up, I noticed that the laptop would periodically freeze up for about 30-60 seconds at regular intervals (almost every minute).  It was clearly unusable so I quickly removed all my personal files.

I'm in the IT industry so I thought I'd try to figure this out.  I used the recovery disks and totally reinstalled Vista 64bit again.  After the installation was complete, the freezing started to happen again.  This time I tried to install just the basic Vista Ultimate 32bit.  I downloaded all the drivers from HP and used Windows Update to update the laptop.  I didn't install anything else (no virus/security software) except for Vista SP1, SP2, and IE8.  The freezing is happening again.  It happens when I'm surfing web sites, playing a mp3 through Media Player, or even using file explorer.

I've ran chkdsk /r a couple times and it appears that it's always fixing bad sectors.  I can't see anything in the Event Logs that point to anything.  Task manager doesn't show any processes running amok and all the CPUs are idle.  Because this is such a vanilla install, I'm starting to think I might have a bad hard drive.  Any ideas?

[melanchete]

I would say that it sounds like a hard drive, but it might be more.

Go into BIOS and test your hard drive.  If it reports an errror, then you might want to contact HP Supprt.   You also might want to test your memory with memtest86+

Here is a system tester:

http://www.testmyhardware.com/test_my_hardware.html

Message Edited by melanchete on 05-31-2009 08:43 PM

[Daniel_Potyrala]

Hi,

Press F10 on Boot to enter Bios. Diagnostics menu -> Hard Drive Self-Test options

choose there Run a comprehensive self-test on any hard drive in the system.

This will test Your HDD. If test will be failed You will need too replace it with new one. In this situation just call HP and they will give You new one. Before giving them HDD backup all files which You need from it.

How to contact with HP You will find here. Just choose Your country.

[badgerfan92 · Accepted solution]

Just to let everyone know, I did the BIOS hard drive test and it would get to 11% and then pop up a message with "Replace Hard Drive 0".  I called HP and they sent me a new drive.  I've installed it and everything seems to be working fine.  Thanks for all your help, everyone!