PC Freezing (can soft restart)

[dkmech]

Hello wise folk of Hexus.

I get a recurring problem where my PC will sort of freeze (Vista, i know "that's your problem right there mate", but I'd rather not reinstall just yet). I can ctrl+alt+del to the welcome screen. If I go for task manager it kind of loads but I cannot get through to it. The only thing that works is the restart button on welcome screen - when I press that it closes everything carefully and gives me control back (sort of) for a few seconds and then restarts. I have set up a shortcut to abort restart, but most of the time it doesn't catch it. The couple times it did though I could use PC fine.

After restart everything generally works fine, although occasionally same thing does happen. The freeze normally happens a few minutes into the session. If it's been al-right for 20-30mins then it stays fine. It's happened when I've been web browsing (Chrome) or playing World of Tanks (haven't done much else lately). But I can't really blame it on chrome (which i did reinstall).

I have been told it could be a trojan or something - I've installed ad-aware and spybot, nothing worse than some cookies. Am trying to remember, maybe there were 3 trojans found a while back, can't quite remember. Nothing of interest shows up in event viewer...

I am at a loss. I want to try avoid a reinstall. If I gotta do it then I am gonna get win 7, maybe a ssd hdd, as would be a good time to do this, but this is gonna be a bit of an expense, so I'd rather just fix this if possible.

Any Idea what it might be? Any other questions I need to answer?

From the fact it soft restarts so well I didn't think it was particularly hardware related, certainly not a cpu freeze.

[oldboy47]

Silly thought but it might be overheating perhaps. Had something similar with a couple of PC's belonging to friends and a good vacuum helped no end. The other time was caused by a graphic card issue.

[eyezpy]

Have you tried scanning the system in safe mode?
You can also try malwarebytes to scan some more or CCleaner to do a reg fix. Run hard disk check on OS drive for bad sectors. System restore to orginal state?
Personally I prefer Windows 7, but never had a problem with Vista disbite all the bad rep.
If your system really is infected, somethimes the only way is to reinstall.

[dkmech]

Firstly I don't think it's overheating - it happens in the first few minutes of running, once I get it going after a restart it will work for many hours without problems, the temps were fine when I checked, and it's not a complete freeze.

I did run ccleaner. Will do a disk check and check out malwarebytes (also do a bootscan with spybot).

System has been running fine on vista for many years despite all the bad rep.

Will see how it goes.

Thanks

[nightcypher]

Double check all your startup items, make sure that there's nothing in there that might be misbehaving. Also make sure you've got all the latest drivers for your hardware, and any updates for your BIOS or other chipsets.