Win7 Hates Me

[Callisto]

I've posted on this before but I thought I had it more or less worked out until last night...having a problem where my Windows keeps shitting itself. Everything is fine for a couple of weeks, then out of nowhere everything will lock up, like absolutely nothing is responsive and it forces me to do a hard reset. Once I do that, when I come back to the login screen everything is normal til I enter my password, then when it hits the 'Welcome' screen it just never goes past that.

I don't think it's a hardware issue, but I have no clue what could be causing it, and I have no idea where to start looking. It boots just fine into safe mode. If I fully wipe and reinstall it's fine for a week or two then shits again. The amount of stuff I have on it is pretty minimal, basic firefox/adobe stuff, avast free, flash media live encoder, a crack of Sony Vegas, and the software for my capture card.

The Vegas and the capture card software would seem like the two most likely, especially since 2 of the 4 times this has happened it was after I had just used the capture software...but there's a ton of people using the same stuff who have no problems with it.

Anyone who can give me an idea of where to start looking to figure out wtf is wrong would be appreciated.

[orinthia]

Random stream of thoughts on things to check:

Check out what is starting upon boot up. Uninstall antivirus/firewall if you can trust yourself in not having/getting a virus of some kind for a while. Run a chkdsk. Check the reliability monitor or other things like that. Maybe drivers are bad. Make sure cards/ram/cables are fully seated and insides not caked in dust. Maybe a certain windows update is creating havoc for you. Setup some restore points early and see if restoring to them once the problems start happening does anything. Do you use reg tweaks or disable "unnecessary" services? Don't next time - keep it as a base install as much as you can stand. Maybe try running without any cracked software if your system craps itself again (find alternatives, though I know vegas is a standard, maybe you can get by without its features to see if your system doesn't nuke itself - and don't run any cracks). Look for other software/drivers that can work with your capture card (maybe use the ones windows update might provide and not install others).

Probably nothing I've mentioned will help, but it'd be a few things I'd try doing before trying different hardware/os altogether.

[Senji]

Chased the same problems around, turned out to need the ram reseated and the slots blown out.