How-To Guides: What To Do When Your Computer Freezes

You’re working on a last minute document or showing the kids a great new piece of software and suddenly your computer stops. It just won’t respond. You press key after key and nothing happens.

If your computer has stopped responding, you need to find out why.

• If the screen has gone blank, it may be due to inactivity. Is your computer set to automatically turn off your monitor screen after a period of inactivity? If yes, pressing any key or the mouse should relight the screen or bring up the logon screen.
• It is possible that your computer is still working on its last task such as saving a document, doing an autosave, or sending a document to the printer. Sometimes, it just needs a few more seconds to finish before you ask it to do another task. Do you hear any sounds of activity? No response?
• Try pressing your ESC key a couple of times. The Escape key may undo your last action(s) in your program and resolve the problem.
• Check your cables. Are they are tightly connected? Caution: connections may appear tight but not be tight so check them carefully. Try pressing a key or your mouse again. Still no response?
• Try ending the non-responsive application (program). Press the Ctrl + Alt + Del keys together.
• If you have Windows 98, the Close Programs box and a list of the programs that are currently running will appear.
• If you are using Windows XP, the Task Manager screen will appear. Click on the Applications tab to see the list of currently running programs.
• If both cases, if Windows has found an unresponsive program, it will list the words "not responding" next to the program's name.
• Click on the “not responding program”, press End Task and return to working on your computer. (You will probably lose any data in the program that you have not yet saved.).
• There are occasions when even the Close Program Box and/or Windows Task Manager Box freezes.  If this happens, you must restart the computer. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del twice. If this does not work, hold the power button down for 15-20 seconds until the computer powers off. Wait several minutes, and power it on again. Caution: Wait a few minutes before restarting  to allow the hardware to come to a complete stop and the memory to completely clear before restarting the computer. Unfortunately, you will lose any unsaved data.

Note: Many programs, including Word and Excel, have autosave features, which periodically save your data as you work. You will have to activate the autosave feature on your computer and must still save your work regularly (File/Save). Autosave does not replace SAVE but may recover most of your work in the case of a computer shutdown.

[Posted on February 2, 2006]