My laptop often frezes

[stevef]

Thank you for the response.
Checking the journal was not intended as a solution - just to see if anything of interest was logged prior to the freeze.

As nothing was recorded it seems to confirm whatever happened was a sudden, critical error.

In a home environment, the only suggestion I have is trying to identify a pattern which leads to a freeze.

[Şerban S.]

Hi!

I've been thinking again and again on this weird behavior.
When I had this kind of trouble, without any visible cause, the only cause proved to be the temperature.
In order to overrule this, you can test very easy the state of the laptop, by putting your hand on the back of it.
If after 10 minutes of uptime you sense an unconfortable heat on it's back, than this is abnormal.
Usually, after some three hours of uptime, you sholuld be able to keep your hand on the back, for at least three minutes, without feeling uncomfortable.
So, if the heat is over normal with this simple way of measuring it, that means that either inside it got cluttered with a lot of dust, or some part is old and coming to its end.
Usually, when I open a laptop for whatever reason, the CPU fan has a lot of dust on it. Also, you need to check the CPU anti-thermal paste. After some 12... 18 months, it wears off and you need to change that, in order to keep a good level of thermal transfer to the CPU fan heatsink. The video chipset, also gets cluttered with dust.
Cleaning those, will improve the air flow inside and reduce overheating significantly.
Still... If you are unfamiliar with this kind of maintainance, you should ask for someone's assistance.
Another approach, is finding YouTube tutorials (there are lots of them).
Study those that show you how to service your laptop.
Cleaning it, is the most common maintainance task.
You can also improve the cooling by using a laptop external cooler (heatsink), USB powered usually. Some have two fans, some other three, or even five.
Years ago, I used such a cooler and it helped me a lot. The reason was the same: I've experienced lots of freezings and it took me some time to figure out what was happening.
What caught my attention was the fact that those appeared mostly during summer.
Best wishes, Șerban.