A computer that locks up mid-sentence, shows a blue screen, or restarts on its own is telling you something is genuinely wrong. Unlike general slowness, this usually comes down to one thing: heat, memory, a failing disk, a driver (the small program that lets Windows talk to a piece of hardware), or a power problem.

The single most useful thing you can do is pay attention to the pattern. That is worth more to us than anything else you send through.

Try this first

1. Write down what you were doing. Which program was open, roughly what time it happened, and whether the machine was plugged in. If there is a blue screen, photograph it with your phone before it disappears. The line of text near the bottom that starts with a word in capitals, such as MEMORY_MANAGEMENT or CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED, tells us a great deal.
2. Force it off, then start it clean. If it is frozen solid and nothing responds, hold the power button down for about ten seconds until it switches off. Wait thirty seconds. Press the power button again. This is safe to do occasionally, though anything unsaved will be lost.
3. Check it can breathe. Overheating causes both freezes and sudden restarts, and it is the most common cause we see. Make sure the vents on the sides and underneath a laptop are not blocked, and that it is not sitting on a bed, a couch or a stack of paper. Desktops under a desk collect dust in the front intake. If the fan is loud and the case is hot, heat is a fair suspect.
4. Check the power. For a laptop, try a different charger if you have one, and make sure the plug is seated firmly. For a desktop, check the power lead at both ends and avoid running it through a cheap powerboard shared with a heater or a kettle. Sudden restarts with no warning and no blue screen often turn out to be power.
5. Install pending updates. Click Start, type Windows Update and open it. Driver and firmware updates fix a surprising number of crash problems, because a bad driver is one of the few things allowed to bring the whole machine down.
6. See whether it is one program or everything. If it only ever freezes in one application, that is a very different fault from a machine that freezes at random. Note which it is.

If that didn't fix it

Send us a ticket with the pattern you have observed. The details that help most are:

• When it started, and whether anything changed around then (a new program, a new monitor, an office move).
• How often it happens now, and whether it is getting worse.
• Whether it freezes, blue screens, or switches off with no warning. These are three different symptoms with different causes.
• The exact wording from any blue screen, or a photo of it.
• Whether it happens on battery, on mains, or both.

Do not keep working on a machine that is crashing repeatedly if you can avoid it. Every hard power-off carries a small risk to open files, and if the cause is a failing disk, the crashes are the warning before the data goes. Move to another machine if one is available and tell us it is urgent.

Why this happens

Freezing usually means Windows is waiting on something that never answers. That is often a disk that cannot read a sector, which is why freezes and a failing drive so often travel together.

Blue screens are Windows deliberately stopping to avoid corrupting something. They are almost always a driver or faulty memory.

Switching off with no warning at all is different again. Windows never had time to complain, which points at heat, power, or hardware giving out. A machine that shuts down after twenty minutes of hard work and is fine again once it cools is a heat problem until proven otherwise.

None of these fix themselves, and none of them are your fault for using the computer normally. Log it, and we will work through it properly rather than guessing.

Still stuck?

Log a ticket at portal.yougrowit.com.au or email support@yougrowit.com.au. If it is stopping you working right now, call 03 9028 4358.

Support hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:30pm Melbourne time, excluding Victorian public holidays.