Year old Vaio freezing... not the hard drive :(

[iBkickinit]

Bought it about a year ago, VGN-FW460J. Core2Duo 2.0 gHz, 4 gigs ram.

Has (had) Vista 64-bit. It has been locking up randomly. sometimes it freezes within minutes of startup, or it could go a day or two of normal use. When it locks up, its completely random. not linked to a program or action or time of day. No errors in the windows log.

Suspected the hard drive, so bought a new 128gig Kingston SSD, installed it with a fresh, clean copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. Fully updated, all drivers up to date, and it has locked up in the same manner twice now in a day.

When it locks, the screen just freezes in place. no mouse movement, hard drive light stays solid, its as if you took a screen shot and just froze it on that. requires holding the power button in for 5 seconds to shut it down.

Just ran the Windows memory diagnostic tool, and no errors found. Help?

 

[iBkickinit]

Bump... 4 months later, and still doing it. please help! NO rhyme or reason to it. I still suspect a hardware issue. Anyone have ideas on how I can test it?

 

[tractorphil]

Try and run with just one stick of memory and if it freezes try the other one. I had a similar issue with one of my laptops and it was memory related. You could try intel burn test to see if the memory is stable. Pick a setting that uses at least 3 gigs so it tests both sticks.

 

[iBkickinit]

Thanks for the tip. I tried this, removing one stick at a time. Within 30 minutes, it locked up, both times. I also ran a video-card stability test for 30 minutes. Verified GPU was at 99%+ the whole time with Open Hardware Monitor. No failure during the test, it froze ten minutes later while googling for more answers! I have also run CPU burn tests for upwards of an hour without failure.

Temperate reached 79 degrees Celsius at the highest and the normal operating temp for the CPU is 50ish...

Nothing I have done to try to cause the failure has resulted in a freeze! Running out of ideas here. Just updated all my drivers. Completely uninstalled my video card drivers, and reinstalled newest download.