lots of problems lately with Vista

...crashing by freezing up and not able to use control alt delete. Cant pinpoint what is causing the problem, can be from a few minutes after startup to up to 30 minutes before it freezes up.

I have tried many things but the problem comes back. I suspected failing hard drive but checkdisk reports no errors on it.

I have restored to various restore points, but it didn't work. I installed advanced system care and security 360 from IObit and ran all of their diagnostics but found no malware viruses or disk errors. Still had the problem of freezing and crashing, but when I tried a restore point again, none were saved.

I then booted in safe mode with networking and tried to find the restore points but there were none. Now, here is where some other problems began. In safe mode, I've got the explorer crashing and restarting every few seconds. so that I cant even use it. I have to kill the explorer process from the task manager and try troubleshooting this way. But after a while it freezes up again and have to hard reboot.

So, I then installed a back-up disc image from one month ago, from Macrium and though things looked better for a day or two, but after installing the latest full windows update, I get the problem again.

not sure what else to check. I've looked through the event viewer, but I cant determine what I am looking for there anyway.

Anyhow, just venting I guess, maybe some suggestions might come to mind that I could try. THanks!

This is a Windows 7 tutorial, but you can still follow it in Vista.
SFC /SCANNOW Command - System File Checker - Windows 7 Forums

Thanks ^ for the link. attached is the result of the scan. Some errors found and some remain... but, how to trouble shoot from this though?

I believe the problems I had were caused by MSE and ZoneAlarm free incompatibilities.

I finally switched to a new 500gb Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B HDD and restored the disc image and partitions from a Macrium backup, uninstalled MSE and kept ZoneAlarms for outbound firewall filtering and everything looks OK now.

Dick Jagger said:

I believe the problems I had were caused by MSE and ZoneAlarm free incompatibilities.

I finally switched to a new 500gb Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B HDD and restored the disc image and partitions from a Macrium backup, uninstalled MSE and kept ZoneAlarms for outbound firewall filtering and everything looks OK now.

Click to expand...

Hi, sorry i couldn't respond earlier... I was on holiday
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