Windows 7 laptop freezing for no apparent reason

Yes I do, as well as all the Lenovo software.

It is enabled by default, it's just that apart from some missing drivers which are found after a clean install of Windows, the drivers are listed as optional updates.

In any case, I have installed every single Windows update, including drivers. When I installed Windows, I kept checking for and installing all Windows updates, until I was able to reboot, launch Windows Update, and the check for updates found nothing new.

Having said that, there are 8 updates to be installed now, which I will do. But none should be applicable to my problem.

Lenovo's System Update software finds no new updates. Also I have run several 3rd party driver update programs to find and install more recent drivers too.

Yes it is an OEM Lenovo battery, and in my case it is not casuing any problems, as the freezing persists when running the laptop with the battery removed.

 

Even though this has me stumped so far. It is very hard for me to believe this is a hardware problem. Having had only 1 maybe 2 hardware failures over a couple hundred T60 & T61's.

 

That's a good suggestion, I will give it a try.

 

It does seem like a hardware problem considering I am not alone in having such problems. But, it is strange that the problem persisted with the touchpad disconnected.

I have just installed some more driver updates with DriverMax and will install other updates it has found later on - as the free version does not put a limit on the number of drivers downloaded any more, but puts an increasing wait period before you can download another driver. I don't think the new drivers will help, but I think it's worth trying, along with Stapp's suggestion of running in Safe Mode with Networking.

 

So far today I have had no freezes, even before I installed driver and windows updates.

I have been moving a finger over the touchpad quickly for seconds at a time, and my computer refuses to freeze. Maybe the driver updates have played a part, as there were zero other changes made to the system between today and last night when it was still reguarly freezing. But, even before I installed the updates my computer did seem to be more stable.

 

Good let's hope it lasts.

I find Driver Booster (free) by Iobit to be better than DM.

 

It's looking promising

I had already run Driver Booster which I do prefer. But, Driver Max finds more driver updates some of which are quite rare. For example, while I was running the last drivers Intel released for the inbuilt graphics, DM found a more recent unofficial driver, which is the result of soemone tweaking Intel's driver for better performance.

 

Good to know. Thanks.

 

Thing with Safe Mode is that it's not always great for troubleshooting because it's not stressing the hardware as much. I can overclock my system and have it run fine under Safe Mode yet have it unstable under normal daily use (same thing with damaged hardware, bad settings, etc). Not that you have any of those problems, just making the case that your system may very well work ok under Safe Mode but not otherwise.

So under Power Options everything is set to "High Performance" and not "Balanced" or "Power Saver"?

 

It was on Balanced, but I have just set it to High Performance. I think it set it to Balanced a few days ago when I was running it on battery.

 

Does the Free Driver Booster back up the selected drivers before installing and new versions of them in case i need to restore the old driver back again.

 

Does the Free Driver Booster back up the selected drivers before installing and new versions of them in case i need to restore the old driver back again.

 

Right, but just because it does work in Safe Mode doesn't always mean software issues. I'm just saying based on years of having my own experience with systems that freeze up and trying to find the cause (and in some of my cases, even though software "fixes" gave the impression that I was onto something, in the end turned out to be just bad hardware.)

 

No, but it does create a restore point before installing the new drivers. In Windows Vista and later there usually is no need to have a driver backup as you can restore drivers by going to Device Manager and doing a roll back on the driver to return to the previous version.

 

I would rather not trust the Restore Point Rollback working to go back to the old Drivers. It looks like Driver Booster Pro Version has a Backup that can be used to restore selected drivers rather than creating a Restore Point to be used to restore old versions of drivers.

 

Me neither, but as I said before, you can go back to old drivers with Device Manager.

You can, but but as per my first sentence, it's no really needed.

 

Just working on a new thinkpad a T60P after I installed 7u32 and updated wu. I did all the updates drivers etc. And then I got the freeze ups as described here. But I took out battery which was very warm 8+ hours updating tweaking. Oh it passed PC-Doctor 100%. It runs perfectly without the battery. IBM power management shows Good - Green & 55Wh/84Wh. So I reinstalled the now cooled down battery & immediately I'm re-gauging it. So tomorrow I'll see if that made any difference. But the consensus is most of the time this relates to a bad battery. So hopefully re-gauging this one will spare me buying another battery.

Update: After re-gauging the battery everything is AOK. I think though with this T60P the problem was a hot battery due to extreme continuous usage after a long storage. The hot battery caused the freezing just as a bad battery would.

 

My laptop is running find 99% of the time now. In my case, the problems was not caused by the battery.

It may have been a driver issue, but I'm not certain of this. However at least I can say that 99% of the time my laptop runs flawlessly.