I've also been having trouble with my laptop and will thus post here.
The other day I tried to hook up a second monitor to my laptop to have duel-screens, and in the process my laptop froze and I had to reset it. Since then it has been randomly having problems. Sometimes when I try to boot it, it will load up the mouse icon and a black background, than nothing else (I believe I saw someone else had this problem, but on mine a second try rebooting makes it work properly.) And now (it started this today) it will occasionally freeze during normal internet-browsing use. During this freeze, I can move the mouse icon, but the icon will not change from whatever it was when it started (It might be the "hourglass" icon or the "select text" icon) and I cannot switch windows or bring up the start menu. Not even ctrl+alt+del will bring up the task manager.
During these black-outs and freezes, the computer is no longer making the usual "ticking" noise. I AM NOT REFERRING TO A HARD DRIVE CLICK OF DEATH NOISE. I have no idea how to better describe it, but it's the normal quiet "tick" every computer I've ever used makes, mostly while it's starting up a program or something intensive.
