ALL programs having NOT RESPONDING issues

HELP!!! This is driving me insane!

I have the NOT RESPONDING issue happening all the time in EVERYTHING from programs to Firefox and Internet Explorer.

This laptop is but a year old and the problems have been pretty much from the day it came out of the box.

Ok, so I may be using a program like MS Word or Photoshop or, as I am currently using Adobe Encore to burn a DVD. I'll be working in each program and after about 15-20 mins of a nice smooth work flow, suddenly these (and other) programs will say NOT RESPONDING. When it comes to Photoshop, Word or Firefox, usually the NOT RESPONDING lasts for a few seconds and then kicks back to normal, but then the program is sluggish for the rest of it's use.

Right now, as I am typing this, I was authoring a DVD in Encore. After it finished rendering the videos, it began to process and burn them on to the blank disc....that's when it decided to stop responding.

My Encore has been stuck on NOT RESPONDING for the last 20 mins. I didn't want to kill the process for fear that I would ruin the DVD burn if the program decided to kick back into normal function. But this is getting ridiculous. It's wasting time, wasting MY energy and wasting my chances of earning a living as I author DVD's for people/small businesses.

Yesterday, while Encore was in the process of transcoding the video files, my laptop just decided to REBOOT itself, causing me to have to re-author the DVD from the beginning all over again and wasting a half burned blank disc.
My laptop has also restared itself on other occasions and this started fairly recently.
I've done scanning with WebRoot and Norton. They find nothing. So what's causing this?
I have a 1 TB hard drive and tons of memory.

What can be done to fix this problem? I am NOT computer savvy in the least but I also do not trust taking my laptop anywhere to get fixed because one time, a few years ago, I took a laptop to get fixed for being so slow and the idiots at the repair shop WIPED MY HARD DRIVE CLEAN! Yup ! Without contacting me first to let me know that there was no other way, they took it upon themselves to wipe out ALL programs and ALL my saved work.

What can I do AT HOME, that is not super technical and can be done easily?

thanks.

This thread is locked. You can follow the question or vote as helpful, but you cannot reply to this thread.

Answer

CmdrKeene

MVP
|
Volunteer Moderator

The 1TB hard drive doesn't really contribute to your performance, it's just a ton of storage. It's like having a really large library, but what matters much much more is RAM, or in this analogy how many books you can put on a desk and read at the same time.

If you're authoring DVDs and doing that kind of work, I'd suggest you have a bare minimum of 8 GB of RAM.

But regardless, when things go "not responding", it means that the system hasn't heard a heartbeat from them. Typically this means the program is incredibly busy (for example, it's normal for Excel to say "not responding" when it's busy calculating the results of hundreds of formulas, and doesn't indicate a problem). But you should not be seeing this when the computer isn't under heavy load.

I would open your Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Escape) and see what programs are hogging the CPU and Disk the most, as well as how much memory is free. If you're member is more than 80% full, the computer is going to start having to move things to the hard drive for temporary storage -- but if the hard drive is busy doing something else, like reading video bits to send to a DVD, then everything has to "get in line and wait", so increasing the RAM is one of the cheapest performance improvements you can make.

And at the same time, you'll want to go minimize non-essential things from running. So after you press Ctrl+Shift+Escape, stop over at the Startup tab and disable everything you don't need hogging the system all the time (it's safe to disable everything here, but some things you might actually want).

Shawn "Cmdr" Keene | Microsoft MVP - Windows Insider | CmdrKeene.com | tweet: @CmdrKeene
Microsoft MVPs are independent experts offering real-world answers. Learn more at mvp.microsoft.com.

ALL programs having NOT RESPONDING issues

Replies (1)

Question Info

ALL programs having NOT RESPONDING issues

Replies (1) 

Question Info

Replies (1)