Today I had a gentleman leave his computer with me.  He was running Vista, and it would lock up within 2 minutes of starting the computer.  If you left it sitting at the login screen, it would lockup there, if you left it long enough.  If you logged in immediately, it would lockup at whatever you were doing  at the moment.  You could still move the mouse, but you could not interact with any applications or open anything.

After much troubleshooting, I narrowed the problem down to the “Superfetch” service.  To confirm this, you can safely set that service to “Disabled” (in services.msc)and reboot the computer (or just stop the service).  After rebooting, or stopping the service, you can confirm that your machine does not lockup.

If indeed you find that your machine runs as it should with the “Superfetch” service disabled, then the fix is simple.

On your keyboard, hold the Windows Key and “R” at the same time.  That should bring up the “run” dialog box.  Type “prefetch” and hit “Ok.”  Now you should see a folder with a bunch of files.  Confirm that your address bar does indeed show that your are displaying the “prefetch” folder and then delete everything that you see.

Be careful!  Don’t delete anything other than the contents of the Prefetch folder or your problems may be worse than what you started with! 

Now start the “Superfetch” service again and you should be cool!

All the best,

Luke