Laptop Frozen: Won't Shut-Down

[Route44]

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. Thanks for the help.

[thideras]

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. Thanks for the help.Either hold down the power button or drop the battery out (don't actually drop it :bday:).

[Route44]

Thanks for the quick reply, thideras. I tried to remove the battery but I just couldn't get the latch to release. I also tried to the power button but after your suggestion of holding it down I did exactly as you said for 5-10 seconds and it finally did power down.

I feel so noobish...:o

Anyway, I am really new to the whole laptop thing. I was suprised it froze as it did. I know definitely it wasn't due to heat. Anything I should be looking out for or can this be chocked up to "a Windows thing"? Thanks again.

[thideras]

Thanks for the quick reply, thideras. I tried to remove the battery but I just couldn't get the latch to release. I also tried to the power button but after your suggestion of holding it down I did exactly as you said for 5-10 seconds and it finally did power down.

I feel so noobish...:o

Anyway, I am really new to the whole laptop thing. I was suprised it froze as it did. I know definitely it wasn't due to heat. Anything I should be looking out for or can this be chocked up to "a Windows thing"? Thanks again.Make sure that you have the newest drivers.

Also, I'd recommend going through a thread that I created, this may help you. The link is in my sig. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to help! :bday:

[Elluzion]

be nice, but as thideras said, hold down the power button if that happens. not good if it freezes though...

[Skeith]

Could be vista, it still has the odd problem with certain games and drivers.

[palesicklydwarf]

My ancient hp omnibook 500 p3 800mhz laptop has been doing that lately as well as displaying an occasional operating system not found message. I think the hard drive is dying as it happens randomly.

[Shelnutt2]

If it happens once, brush it off was bad coding in Windows. If it happens again then you have an issue and you need to try and track it down.