Can anyone help with this?

**Option hunter** · 06-27-10, 10:56 PM

So, a friend of mine recently installed a printer onto her laptop. Now her laptop isn't working right. Here's what she gave me, via another forum board.

The laptop's a Dell Inspirion running Windows Vista, and the printer is also a Dell - I'm not sure specifically what kind, but it's a printer/scanner/fax combo. Since installing the printer, the computer will run normally for somewhere between 5-20 minutes, then freeze, with whichever program I'm currently using being the first to stop responding, and then anything else I have open allowing me to maximize and minimize it once before not responding anymore. The cursor still moves fine, but the computer does not respond to clicking on anything or to any keyboard shortcuts. It doesn't recover from this on it's own; I have to manually shut it off and then restart it, at which point the process repeats.

Anyone know whats up?

**DancingCorpse** · 06-27-10, 11:51 PM

hmmmmm....well, first, I would have her open up the Task Manager and leave it on the performance tab first thing when it comes on and then have the laptop reproduce the results. See what happens with the performance, like CPU over use, or RAM leaks.

**nsRaven** · 06-28-10, 09:21 PM

So, this "friend" of yours, because know that can't really be you, do you know if she only installed drivers (something Vista could have done on its own) or did she install the software that came with the printer? Printer monitoring software can sometimes be a resource hog and occasionally screw other things up. Especially Dell...I'm not really Dell fan anyway though, so I'm biased. Its really not needed since all you really need are drivers and to let Windows do the rest.