Computer freezes after idle time.

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HTML Document

Hi, this happened out of the blue Thursday. When my Vista Home Premium-SP1,
is idle for awhile, the computer freezes... the screen is a grayish color and
the mouse circle just keeps twirling. I have to manually re-boot.
Everything is fine until I leave and come back...and it is frozen again. I
cannot ctrl-alt-delete either. When I went to do a system restore, I saw
that all my restore points were gone. How could this have happened? I
thought maybe a windows update could be the source so I uninstalled the many
updates ( approx. 25)....the next morning , I saw they had all returned even
though I have it set not to download automatically. I am hoping that someone
here has a solution for this bizarre behavior. Please help.
Thank you !!
Eileen
 
HTML Document said:
Hi, this happened out of the blue Thursday. When my Vista Home Premium-SP1,
is idle for awhile, the computer freezes... the screen is a grayish color and
the mouse circle just keeps twirling. I have to manually re-boot.
Everything is fine until I leave and come back...and it is frozen again. I
cannot ctrl-alt-delete either. When I went to do a system restore, I saw
that all my restore points were gone. How could this have happened? I
thought maybe a windows update could be the source so I uninstalled the many
updates ( approx. 25)....the next morning , I saw they had all returned even
though I have it set not to download automatically. I am hoping that someone
here has a solution for this bizarre behavior. Please help.
Thank you !!
Eileen
Click to expand...

Of course, you don't have any system backups to fall back on... right?
 
Hi Manny,
What do you mean by system backup? I back up my data files weekly...
Eileen
 
HTML Document said:
Hi Manny,
What do you mean by system backup? I back up my data files weekly...
Eileen
Click to expand...

You should have been using an imaging program such as Acronis True
Image to backup your entire system to either a second internal hard
drive or an external USB drive.

If you don't have that, you might be up that proverbial creek:

Other than that, I have no words of wisdom to offer you.

Sorry.
 
So what are you saying? My system didn't crash. It works fine...until it is
idle for an hour or two...then it freezes up. You are suggesting a system
failure....I don't have that ( I hope)
 
HTML Document said:
So what are you saying? My system didn't crash. It works fine...until it is
idle for an hour or two...then it freezes up. You are suggesting a system
failure....I don't have that ( I hope)
Click to expand...

I'm clueless about your problem.

System Restore takes care of a myriad of problems. It it's not
working, I don't know what to tell you.

I have used System Restore as a quick fix for many problems I've
caused over the years, and if that failed - which was seldom - I've
restored from my backups.
 
Thanks Manny, I googled this problem and I am not the only one....there are
thousands........I will keep looking..there is an answer somewhere I'm sure.
Eileen
 
I wonder if the following is the culprit:
The VSS service is shutting down due to idle timeout
This was in the Event Viewer just before the freeze.
 
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