Bought a new laptop for my daughter for college back in mid-May. She is by no means a gamer; this will be used for college work with Office 2003, emails, and internet. She takes very good care of it.

Since she got it it has run smoothly. Other than updating Vista and loading Avast Free over a month ago, this laptop has been used primarily for Word Documents, some simple gaming like Mong-Jong, and once she ran a DVD movie.

Tonight she booted up w/o a hitch. After everything loaded she decided to play Mong-Jong. 3 minutes into the game it froze. The cursor won't move. Control-Alt-Delete does nothing. The power switch does nothing. Right now it is running on battery power. I can't reboot.

Compaq/HP V6310 with 1 gig of RAM, Turion 64 X2 T-50, 100gb harddrive, Vista Home Premium.

Certainly could use some suggestions. Thanks.

Things like this happen, the annoying thing about laptops are their battery, so you can't just hard shutdown from the wall. If you can remove the battery, then leave it out for a minute or so, then the laptop should boot properly.

Or if you're not confident with removing the battery, you can always just wait around for the battery to drain :P

Hexon, you stated: Things like this happen, the annoying thing about laptops are their battery, so you can't just hard shutdown from the wall. Boy are you right. I really appreciate your quick reply. I pretty well know PC hardware but this whole laptop thing is new to me. I tried removing the battery but I couldn't get the latch to fully release. So I planned on letting the battery run down as you suggested.

However, it seems that though I pressed the power switch, I wasn't holding it in long enough. After about 5 to 10 seconds it powered down.

So, what we expereinced tonight I take it wasn't out of the ordinary? Can I chock it up "It's a Windows thing" or should I be concerned about something in particular?

Thanks again.

Its a windows thing. More likely related to the game she was playing.

If it's a regular occurence, then you have something to worry about.

But things like this are just software bugs, nothing to worry about.
Hardware issues are the ones that will keep you up at night :P

You might be able to go into the safemode and remove the game off the system that might fix your problem. If you had a profile you could go into safe mode and remove that profile then windows would fix your problem and re-create a new profle for you.