so yesterday about 10'oclock my computer froze closing word. it is a good thing I had saved all my work. any way explorer.exe froze so I couldn't ctrl+alt+delete out of it or shutdown normally. I was forced to hold the power button in and hard shutdown. I'm in the habit that every time i have to do this i restart to make sure everything is alright. problem, windows loading animation looped endlessly and hard disk activity stopped altogether. at this point I knew something was wrong. I hard shutdown and tried again. this time the loading scree went away to the black screen like normal but shortly there after it blue screened on me. Now I KNEW something was f***ed up, blue scree during the START UP!?!? I had never even heard of it before. trying to boot into "repair your computer" mode also produced a blue screen, by this time I'm getting fairly scared was i even going to be able to fix it with out telling my dad who would of blown a gasket and shelling out a few hundred for a repair man. so i tried to boot from the install disk and access the repair function there. that took 20 friken minutes from pressing enter to boot from cd drive to able to use the mouse and actually click something. NEVER taken that long before the only reason i didn't shut it down was because i saw that there was still disk activity so SOMETHING must of been going on I took a bath while I was waiting. any way i clicked on "repair your computer". took ten minutes to load the next widow. then selected "start up repair" that ran for a little while the said it was fixing disk errors so I let it run. then it restarted and ran the startup recovery again to fix something else. finally it would start. but as soon as everything was finished starting (the startup programs ect.) the computer froze again exactly like it had before I hard shut down.
so I had stopped the blue screening and was able to log in but the computer still froze and was unusable. so I attempted to start in safe mode the first time that didn't work it just got stuck. so i ran start up recovery again and did some memory diagnostics and tried again with safe mode. this time it worked.
at that point i said that well I don't have anything critical on here so the easiest way to solve the freezing problem is to do a factory image restore so i promptly ran a virus scan (it picked up two things), backed up my data that was in my docs folder and on the desktop, and re-imaged. now I'm back, disaster averted and nearly have my computer back to where it was. I'm getting far too god at resurrecting a computer.