Laptop BEEP

[Teho]

If it were mine, I would recover music, photos and stuff, and then jump up and down on it. But hey..

It freezes with a beep, that's a signal from the BIOS that there's something wrong hardware-wise, isn't it? Sounds like an overheating issue by the way it behaves. Actually my previous system did something very similar when it's chip fan stopped working. That would be the one cooling the BIOS chip on the motherboard. Changed it for a heatsink which solved my problem, of course that will be hard to do on a laptop.

[Demon Cleaner]

I think if it would be an overheating problem, it would also beep and freeze in safe or mini XP mode, but it's now running for 20 hours in mini XP mode with Spybot scanning files.

[Teho]

I see. I don't have any other suggestions then.

[Tiago]

If it was a heating problem, would it freeze (everything locked) in only 5 minutes??? How hi the temperature goes in only 5 minutes?
I had similar problems of heating, but it wuld only crash after 20 minutes or more.

[Harrison]

It could be faulty ram... in the full OS it will be utilising and stressing the ram much more than in safe mode or from a disc booted mini OS.

It could also be heat related. Again in safe more or other booted environments it won't be stressing the system as much, but in Windows it could be using the gpu more which would cause a single beep error and freeze like this. If possible try to run Prime95 to test the ram. If that passes then its a heating issue for sure, probably a fan has stopped working, or a heatsink come lose. Only way to really check that is to take the laptop apart, clean everything inside and run it without the case on to check fans are spinning up etc...

If all hardware seems OK then the last resort has to be a format and clean install. Its the only solution to rule out a messed up OS.

[Demon Cleaner]

I managed to fix it last week, worked 3 days on it. A clean install would have been the best option, but as she gave me the laptop before going to holiday, I didn't know which files to backup, nor I had her original Windows CD, nor I had her permission.

Mainly I was running anti malware applications to remove a lot of malware, and there was quite a lot. Then I installed Avast to get rid of loads of viruses, as her McAfee already expired in 2007!!!!, so it wasn't updated since 3 years. Also had to install SP3 on XP, as that wasn't also updated since a long time. There was also still remains of Symantec software which I removed with the Norton Removal Tool, and also removed completely McAfee with a McAfee removal tool.

Then I updated software and drivers with DriverCure (great program btw), and also managed to get the wireless working again. There was some Dell software blocking Windows to establish it's own wireless connection, took quite some time to find that out though.

I also stopped like 40 programs starting with Windows, and 80% of them I didn't even know what it was, had to check on internet. Did also a registry clean, Registry Mechanic found over 1300 obsolete entries.

[Harrison]

Sounds like that system was quite a mess. Did you install a new security suite on the there? Comodo or something similar. Definitely sounds like she needs one!