Right, I have an old Dell Inspiron laptop, about 2.5 years old. Until recently its been fine, but within the last week or so the keyboard came slow to respond and letters took ages to appear. I read on the net this could be overheating, or a bit of Windoze that can be fixed in msconfig. Anyway, I reinstalled/formated the OS HDD and that issue went. So I was pleased.

Now however, I can't shut down, standby, restart or hibernate the machine as it takes around 20-30 minutes to register what I pressed, if at all! The other thing is Firefox (3.5) keeps hanging (can be after as little of 1-2 minutes of use) and can take up to 10-30 minutes to unfreeze, but everything else will work.:confused: While this is happening I can't open IE at all, but as soon as FF resumes, IE will open. I reformated again thinking maybe the install had failed, but it still does it.

Does anyone have any ideas to the likely cause of these issues, or is it likely to be a sympton of overheating as suggested by the orginal typing issue, or anything else?

Thanks in advance, and sorry for the long post!

Overheating would slow the processor down. Does the CPU fan run occasionally?.

Thanks for replying.

It seems to have 3 settings, off, slow and fast. Its on slow for a few minutes, then switches to fast where it will stay until it crahses.

After 5 - 10 minutes use (on my lap) its around 70c for the CPU.

is the airflow good, if it is then it could be dust build up on the heatsink inside the laptop.

Good point, the vents get very dusty and I try to clean them, but the internals I haven't touched. Will have ago later today.

Try an airduster through the vents that should be a good starting point.

Thanks, will try and report back later.

Right, I tried the cleaning of the heatsink which knocked around 20c off the CPU temp, but the problem was still there. As a last resort I have put Vista onto it :thumbdwn: (used to be XP) and that seems to have fixed the problems.

Thanks for your help though Mannyo.