Toshiba Satellte keys freeze up while typing

[dannyual767]

My wife's 1 yr old L455-S5975 Win7 Toshiba worked great until about 3 weeks ago when numerous problems simultaneously developed. We decided to do a reformat (I think that it was actually a "recovery.")

The computer still isn't right. My wife can live with it but one of the very annoying things that its doing is delaying the display of letters that you type. In other words, if she's trying to type in "www.techist.com" the computer may display one of the first letters (w) and then stop displaying anything else as she continues to type. Then, all of a sudden, the next group of letters will instantly appear. It does this all the time and is very annoying. Other than a complete, full reformat, does anyone have any idea what it may be and how we might fix it?

 

[MindoverMaster]

Could be a hard drive problem. If you know the make of the HDD, download a dianostic cd from the manufacturer.

 

[dannyual767]

I guess that I could take the panel off and see if I can see the label on the hard drive itself to get the make. My wife really wants her computer back to it's old self and I don't blame her. I'm using it to make this post and it sure bites watching it freeze up regularly.

 

[TieFighter]

Your issue seems to be shared by some others with Windows 7. Personally, I have a Toshiba Satellite and haven't experienced any problem like that with it, but I also don't have Windows 7.

Anyway, based on some advice on a Microsoft Guru's reply:

The lagging PC may have some corrupt files. Rightclick a Command Prompt icon and "Run as Administrator" . Run the command:

SFC /SCANNOW

to repair your system files.

 

[dannyual767]

TieFighter, thank you for the information. We had high hopes that it would find some type of error but were very disappointed when it came back with: "Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations."

 

[dannyual767]

I just wanted to add some other information in hopes that somebody has some more suggestions for me. Its not just the keys that freeze up. The entire computer continuously freezes for short periods of time. The mouse pointer never seems to freeze but other things do. For instance, if you try to click on something, usually you'll have to click several times because the first click or two may be during a momentary freeze up. Same thing happens if we try to use the up and down scroll bar on the right side of the screen. Sometimes it won't move until the computer unfreezes.

I spoke with my grown son over the phone about this problem. He is no newbie to computers and his opinion is that it could be a hardware issue. That would explain why after reformatting/recovering the computer, the problem persists.

Happy New Year to all.

 

[MindoverMaster]

Try getting Memtest86+, burn it to a CD, and boot with it. Let it go a couple passes. Any errors, and it is your RAM.

 

[dannyual767]

Try getting Memtest86+, burn it to a CD, and boot with it. Let it go a couple passes. Any errors, and it is your RAM.

Thanks, Mind. I ran the test and, unfortunately, it came back with no errors. Its gotta be something else.

 

[Peter.Cort]

bring up task manager and watch the CPU usage. I've seen this before on my toshiba laptop and what happened to me was that a program running would suddenly spike the CPU usage up to 100% which would coincide with the freeze of whatever it was that I was doing. if you can pinpoint a specific program that's doing it then try and reinstall the program. Otherwise I would say backup all the files and reformat the hard drive and do a full reinstall.

 

[dannyual767]

Here is a screenshot of the Task Manager and Resource Monitor. Take a look at the graph of the disc . We compared this freeze up laptop to our new HP laptop and it's graph doesn't look anything like this screenshot! What are those blue lines and why is the disk peaking out at 100%?

This screenshot was taken with no open web browser. The desktop is in the background.

Another bit of information about this ailing laptop. During the college football bowl games, I tried to watch streaming video from espn.com. It was impossible to watch because the video constantly froze up. I ended up watching some of the bowl games via an older XP desktop.