I bought this laptop about 9 months ago before my deployment, let it be known that it endured 7 long months of afghani moon dust 24/7. It wasn't until the last month or so that it developed an odd issue. It started off with the PC freezing, garunteed, after roughly 5 minutes of use no matter what. Turned out there was a virus (came up as explore.exe in my processes, not to be confused with explorer.exe). Upon removal, the computer functioned well again. However about 3 weeks later, it ran into a new problem. Now I can use the computer indefinitely and it works just fine (been on it for about 4 hours today), however if left idle for say... anywhere between 30 minutes to two hours, it will freeze. This only happens if the computer is NOT being used, and regardless of whether screen saver is enabled/disabled, whether programs are running or not, or whether its on the desktop or even just the login screen. I can't figure it out, as long as I'm sitting here surfing the web, playing a game, or sitting on an instant messenger, it won't freeze. But if I go grab dinner and come back an hour later, I'll have to shut it off and restart it due to it just locking up. I have Vista 64bit, a nVidia 9600m GS graphics card, core 2 duo processor.

Could be a BIOS problem. Have you checked the Asus support page for BIOS updates?

Start with event viewer logs. Might have to setup a perfmon. Gbyakys! Playing to the angels Les Paul (1915-2009)

Alright so I figured I would give the BIOS a try first, I downloaded BIOS version 207 for my laptop, the X83VM model. I'm not sure what to do with the file I downloaded, it says its a "File 207" file, no clue where to put it. *EDIT* upon looking more on the website I believe I found the correct way to update my BIOS. I also took a look at the event viewer which I've never done before, not quite sure how I would determine which error may be causing the problem, but the most recent and dominant one says "Source WMI, occured 11 times in the past 7 days, and 130 times total" with this as the error message: "Event filter with query "SELECT * FROM __InstanceModificationEvent WITHIN 60 WHERE TargetInstance ISA "Win32_Processor" AND TargetInstance.LoadPercentage > 99" could not be reactivated in namespace "//./root/CIMV2" because of error 0x80041003. Events cannot be delivered through this filter until the problem is corrected." I'm not computer savvy enough to make sense of that. The other log that stuck out to me was from NTFS, 3664 errors, although none within the past 7 days. However when I try to "view all instances" it gives me a data is invalid message. The NTFS errors may be from every time the PC freezes and I have to restart, I *almost* always get the disk check program running when I restart. checking the C drive for errors. Always comes up with the same few files listed. stocks_docked_03.png and stocks_docked_04.png along with a few others. Appreciate the help so far!