Let me start by thanking you for all your help and saying. While I do have a basic understanding of computers and their inner workings, my knowledge is purely self-taught from issues such as this. I do, however, have a limit and I'm definitely beginning to believe it's not application based and it's actually hardware based. From day 1 I've had issues with some of the hardware in the Laptop. Including, the wireless card - upon booting up the PC initially, the wireless card (even though on) would not pick up a wireless signal. I had to go into the device manager and manually disconnect/reconnect the card to get it to start working (after updating the driver). This issue has not stopped. I am going to return and exchange (for the same one) the laptop @ BestBuy considering the multitude of issues I've had since I've opened it. What I've done is below to see if for one final time I can fix the issue and my own observations from when the freezing occurs.
I've looked around, and started from the 1st when I purchased the PC. I found a several instances in the System Events that showed where I had to hard boot the system, however, nothing in the System Log that showed something crashing except from when I first installed Avast! It reported the program "The avast! Antivirus service is marked as an interactive service. However, the system is configured to not allow interactive services. This service may not function properly." - So naturally that would have been the problem early on, however, since I've still had the freezing problem post Avast! uninstall I have to think it's coming from elsewhere.
I didn't find one other thing that really struck me as off in the System, while not an event. It is a warning that I don't completely understand why it's happening.
"The speed of processor 0 in group 0 is being limited by system firmware. The processor has been in this reduced performance state for 804 seconds since the last report."
From what I'm reading here, the system itself is limiting the speed of my processor. I'm assuming it's limited it's speed to prevent overclocking/overheating. If I'm wrong please correct me.
I fished through the Application Log and from what I can tell nothing is causing the system to crash there. I've been observing what is going on more thoroughly since I've begun to do all of this. From what I've observed. The PC crashes when 1) I'm playing a game on the laptop (MMOs mainly). 2) A notification bar pops up from the Task Bar (*However, this doesn't cause it all the time. Only certain programs have made it crash. e.g. Avast! and Yahoo! Messenger). It's also crashed RIGHT after a start-up with nothing running, however, this has stopped since I uninstalled Avast!. The PC has crashed once since the uninstall.
My assumptions are hardware failure (Graphics/Wireless Cards), but I would assume this would have shown up in the event log. Overheating, event log also though. Or a piece of software installed (I've uninstalled everything that was causing a conflict, but it froze soon after all the uninstalls were done).
I know this is a lot to read, but it's also my last try to pinpoint the issue before I exchange. (Though if I have the same issue, I'll probably be right back here.) I am on CST, but considering I'm up @ 4:09 AM. I doubt I'll be returning it first thing in the morning here
