brand new lenovo running win 8.1. freezes

[janicaa]

I bought this computer (lenovo g510) a month ago and in the first three weeks in froze three times with me running MsWord, Chrome and Foobar at the same time (or: nothing drastic). It froze in such a way that the mouse did not react and neither did the crt+alt+del work so I had to manually shut it down (pressing the on/off button for a longer time) and when starting up the computer would act normally.

It hasn't frozen for the last week, but as I am travelling Monday for a longer time I am puzzled whether to travel without the laptop and just take it to the repairservice or if I should take the laptop with me cause the problem might have solved itself (if it was windows' fault which has since installed some updates) I went to the repairplace today and have explained my problem and the guy said he thinks that the problem was software related - for instance me having installed avast and malwarebytes at the same time, while win 8 has its own antivirus (which I can't see on the uninstall list but okay). Is the guy right and the only thing I have to do is uninstall avast?

I've done the whole tweaking.com program's procedure and the program did find errors on the drive and once I start check disk and it "repairs" the errors on startup - tweaking.com finds errors on the drive again. When I had run chckdsk in MsDos myself (and not via tweaking.com) no errors were found.

So my question is what do you think is wrong. And if there are errors on the drive - should I leave it at the repairplace then?
Thanks so much for offering help and your tweaking.com programme is lovely and has helped me with my previous laptop and I recommend it to everyone so keep up the great and generous work!

Laptop runs on genuine Windows 8.1. that have since been updated several times. If anymore info is needed let me know, I would just need help in deciding whether to bring my new laptop with me on this journey, or to take my old one while the new one is being repaired.

[philetus]

That new, I would save my personal stuff and restore it to factory setup and see if the problem starts up again.

[Boggin]

Event Viewer should have recorded these events with which to determine your course of action as I would be concerned if a brand new computer started freezing up for no reason.

Post what you find in Event Viewer with the time stamps of the freezes and Shane will be able to advise, but as he may not be back until Monday, you may have to decide on which machine you take with you.

You could download MiniToolBox (think it will work on Win 8.1), check all of the boxes and post its output http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/minitoolbox/

[Shane]

I have had customers have this happen on their machines as well, and it can be a number of different things.

1. Software related? Yes, it can be. but that is easy to test by doing a clean boot with all 3rd party apps disabled. This could also mean viruses as well, but since it is a new machine it is less likely.
2. Bad memory. Have had this happen as well, where the memory had bad spots that where at the higher end, so the problem didn't show itself until more memory was in use. Doing a memory test can confirm if it is the memory or not.
3. bad sectors on the hard drive. This happens a lot, system files or something hits a bad sector on the drive and the whole system locks. This is easy to test for as well.
4. Bad drivers, somehow one of the system drivers could have got messed up. (This doesnt happen very often, but it does happen)

So basically it is a process of elimination. 

Shane