my father inlaw has a compac cpu and it locks up a lot i mean it freezes up no responce at all no. the reset nor the power button dos nothing. could this be a bad hard drive or a virus? can anyone help? thanks for the help in a advance.

does the drive make noise?
have you done a through virus scan?
have you done a through scan disk in safe mode and did you get error mesages?
have you added any new soft ware?
dose holding power switch in for more that 10 seconds not shut it off?you might have the power button set to hibernate when pushed rather than shut off.to check goto start run,settings,control panel,power management and make sure power buttons set to power off not hibernate.
allso well in settings delete your temporty online and off line temperary internet files.

the drive makes noise for a little bit then it stops. some times when we load all the way up. some times it wont loda at all. wont let us get vary far on the scan before it stops responding.power button does nothing even whin holding down.no new softwere was added at all. hibernate is off.and done the rest with internet. what do you think it could be?

hello
i had some of the same symtums just a while back except for the power button.virus scans were comeing up fine both on line and off.
my scan disk would no longer run even in safe mode. did you try scan disk in safe mode?because m.e does not usealy do a complete through scan set to fined and fix errors other wise.i was hopeing you could do the scan disk to elimanate hard drive haveing errors on it .so we'd know its not starting to fail.so far hard drive is not makeing excessive noise.but im at a loss to tell you any thing use full sorry.
what you should do is repost with all the system specks like it lists at the top of m.e forum.and give any answers to any questions ive asked and any thing else you can think of if you repost giveing all the system spects you most likely will get responces from the veary much more experianced peaple in here.they dont like posting answers unless they get all the detials.1 it shows your makeing an effort.
2 it makes it easyer for them to answer.
i try to answer these posts because i dont like seeing any one being left out.does not allways mean i able to.this is one of them sorry