What would cause a Laptop with Windows Vista to severely crash?

Laptops tend to only last a couple of years. The good news is its mothers day, surprise her with a new one. Prices for laptops have dropped drastically!!!

Windows Vista would cause that.

Heck just having Vista can cause crashes it is full of viruses.

Maybe its is a virus which is causing this to happen.

my comp started doing that too, its overheating, raise it up with four wooden blocks on the corners so that the underside has only air beneath it.

Take it to a shop and have the cooling fins cleaned.
3 Years is plenty of time for lint and dust to clog the fins.The big clue is that it starts working again after you let it cool down.

http://www.uofr.net/~greg/hardware/laptop_power_troubleshooting/laptop_lint.jpg

Does it have a up to date anti virus? Without it a virus could easily do this. If so is it overheating? Put some Lego underneath (or something small) so it has some air.
If it still happens then use system recovery to put it back before it all happened.
If after all this it still keeps doing this, it might be time for a new, clean install of windows.
If your not comfortable doing it take it to a PC shop and tell them whats happening and request that they put a clean OS install on it, but also ask they make sure nothing else is wrong first.
Whatever you do keep vista even if its slow because soon Windows 7 will come out and we’ll all be happy shiny PC’s again!
Matt

because there is probably some virus in bedded in the hard drive. which can be fixed by running a virus scan and deleted them or if the laptop wont turn on at all you might need to recovery disk and start all over

May I know the capacity of RAM from your mom’s laptop. Vista is pretty heavy OS so it would require at least 1GB of RAM to work just fine.

It could be a virus, the hard drive failed, or a number of other reasons. If the computer can start up, try going into safe mode and running your anti-virus to see if there is a bug behind the crash.

Jeff
Windows Outreach Team