My IBM ThinkPad 600E hangs or freezes up occasionally. I could be deleting or moving files around or be on the internet. When it happens, the screen, mouse and keyboard freeze up. The orange Hard-Disc-In-Use light stays lit but I can hear the hard drive working only intermittently. After waiting maybe 15-20 minutes, the orange light finally goes out, but the screen is black. I can then do CTL+ALT+DELETE and it restarts fine.
Anybody know why it's freezing up like this and what can be done to prevent this?

Thanks,
Mike

Sometimes a good old fashioned re-boot will clear out freeze glitches.
If that no-workee............

Go to:

Start/shutdown/re-boot in MSDOS

When you get into DOS C: prompt, type in:

scanreg /fix

This will take a few minutes, as it is more thorough than the "toy" scanreg done from a windows dos box.

If the freeze problem is in the reg, this will (maybe) fix it.

Next, go back to windows and click on:
start/run and type in:

sfc

billygates will then check your file system and fix any errors there (sometimes).

Otherwise, check for conflicts in software.

start/run
type:
vcmui

Read what it says. If there are no files listed in the box, there are no conflicting drivers, etc.

You may want to try running gasp..........scandisk!
Try it from windows AND from re-boot DOS prompt. Don't let it run the HDDsurface scan.

Other than that, if you recently put some new software in, uninstall it and see if the freezes continue.

For whatever reason, the following trick I discovered has worked for me on several occasions, especially when the computer keeps wanting to boot to SAFE MODE.

In your case, it's NOT booting to safe mode, so do a restart and press F8 as soon as the BIOS info appears on the screen.

This will put you in SAFE MODE.
After the mouse cursor settles down, then just do a start/shutdown/restart, and boot back into windows.

I've had this fix glitches on several occassions.

You might want to also try:
start\run
type:
msconfig

Click on GENERAL tab, and follow your nose, eleminating various startup items to see if something eleminates the freezes.

Wow! Thanks justaguy for the super info. I'm going to try to uninstall those crappy QuickTime and RealOne players. I think I'm getting hung up only when I go to websites that trigger MIDI files immediately.

Thanks,
Mike