vista buggy bootup

I have a Vista Home Premium x64 SP2, Toshiba Satellite A305 with 4GB of RAM and integrated video/sound, i have 2 hard drives each with roughly 250GB of space, my CPU is Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T5750 @ 2.00GHz

i left my laptop on overnight with out an Internet connection (in case it decided to restart or something the network i am on won't allow the computer to shut down successfully if it is on the network, it just freezes) and when i got on the next day every window that was already open that i clicked on froze, and i clicked the start button and the start window only partially came up and i got a message that explorer.exe had crashed. so i held the power button until it died.

next when i logged into my user name i got a black screen, nothing was starting, when i brought up task manager it showed 10 processes in the list but 87 were active and it was using 100% CPU, after leaving it on for 5 hours with the only progress being my task-bar popping up but my cursor being the busy icon when i roll over it i held the power button down again.

next i successfully booted into safe-mode and ran a system restore witch took 2 hours, i then booted into vista, it took about 1 hour to boot and it looked like it had booted, but everything just started freezing again, so i ran sfc in safe-mode witch did not make things better at all!

If you can boot into windows or safe mode, download Process explorer and save a list of all processes. Upload that in a zip file.

OK i ran the program in safe mode (i can't even get my desktop to show up in normal, or get my task manager to run it as a new task) i don't know how effective a list like this would be since my computer works just fine in safe-mode

Uninstall Ad-Aware and keep Norton. 99% chance they are conflicting.

minor problem, i got on today and my computer just dies right before it boots, it loads the last thing in safe-mode then just restarts

Try safe mode with command prompt, and if that works enter chkdsk /f /r

If that doesn't work, try taking out the hard drive and putting it into another pc and scanning it there. If that's too much trouble (and it is) is your laptop still under warranty?

i think i should also mention i am duel booting with ubuntu 9.04 (thats how i am posting this now, just thought i should mention it in case), and my laptop is not under warranty unfortunately, that was the first thing i checked when this started happening.

Ubuntu might have cracked your partitions, I'd wait until 7 comes out and install that. Don't dual-boot though as Windows will probably have problems. Use virtualization or another pc. If you paid for Windows, why use Ubuntu?

i just have ubuntu to play around in honestly, and i also set up my partitions in vista and told ubuntu to just use one of them

ok i tried to boot into safe-mode command prompt and i got a BSOD just long enough to see a blue screen with white text

also as for windows 7, i'm worried since the only copy i can get is professional, but i have vista home premium

also i tried the virtualization of ubuntu and i got a BSOD

Why only Professional? If you have premium and qualify for an upgrade it should be premium. It seems as if Vista is dying. Navigate to the .dmp file in Ubuntu if your Windows partition can be accessed and then debug it if you have another vista pc, if not I'd wait for Windows 7 and a clean install after formatting.

qualify for an upgrade, this is the first time i heard about this, i thought i had to buy a copy

also would this kill all my data?

Since you have Ubuntu, navigate your windows partition in the places menu, it will most likely have the number of space in GB's as its name, and back everything up to an external 1TB hard drive. When you install 7, it will dump most of your stuff in a folder called Windows.old. Just in case, back everything up.

Depending on your laptop, you may qualify. Check the model online. Sorry I couldn't help more but if Vista won't boot like you've been experiencing there isn't much you can do. 7 is much better though, so far anyway.

ya, i was planning on upgrading i was just worried about the back up and different features between home and professional, and after looking at the upgrade on-line since my laptop is 2 years old now i am fairly sure it doesn't qualify. thanks for your help though, there is still one more thing i want to try and that is a restore (or something) using my disk, the only reason i haven't used it yet is i can't find it

Restore your hard drive? If safe mode with command prompt doesn't work, it won't work. Sysresucecd might help if you read the detailed instructions on the site regarding your hard drive. Also, Professional will be similar to Vista Business. If you don't need media centre - and on a laptop, who does? - then go for Professional. You can use XP mode to run poorly coded apps, but if your laptop is 2yrs old it might not have the balls for this to run very smoothly.

it says on the Microsoft site that professional has everything that home does, and according to the system requirements they listed my laptop should be able to handle everything it can through at it

Precisely.