Folks, a few week ago I asked why my wife's machine would be randomly freezing. I followed the advice of a few people and unplugged DVD drives and pull all the plugs out and swapped the memory sticks and blew it all out with the vacuum cleaner, etc, but nothing helped. I also reset BIOS to normal and safe defaults with no effect. It certainly was a hardware problem, but what?
Last weekend I rang a mate of mine who used to build computers for a living (back before it was cheaper to buy them whole). He told me to look in the BIOS for suspicious speed settings that I could incrementally lower. I found a clock option of some kind that went from 9 to 21, it was set to 20. I set it back to 15 but it still froze. I set it down to 10 and simultaneously turned off turbo-boost. It's cured!!! So I changed two things at once, but it's a miracle cure. So this is just a heads-up for anyone else who might suffer frustrating problems like this, I guess the lesson is ... don't forget the BIOS. Greg
