Vista keeps freezing randomly

I've got a problem I can't seem to figure out. Two days ago, my laptop started freezing completely at random times. It's a complete freeze, nothing responds at all, you have to manually power it down. It really seems to be happening at random times, I've had it happen while using Chrome, while using Firefox, and also just sitting idle with nothing open at all. I have no clue if this means anything but the computer has made a single "beep" a few times right when the freeze occurs.

I'm currently running in safe mode, and in safe mode I have had no problems and the freezing is not happening. I've also ran full scans with Spybot and Avast (updated both first) and that hasn't helped.

Anyone have any ideas? I'm pretty computer literate and can usually solve these kinds of things but this is over my head. Thanks in advance.

 

UPDATE:

I went and looked through the event history, and starting at the same time as the crashes, I have tons of errors relating to the windows search service. Not sure if that's the cause or a byproduct of the actual issue. Also, had this error message after the latest crash, I'll post below in case anyone knows what this means. Again, I have no problems in safe mode but in normal mode, I crash in 10-20 minutes after startup.

Error message:
The COM+ Event System detected a bad return code during its internal processing. HRESULT was 8007043c from line 45 of d:\vistasp1_gdr\com\complus\src\events\tier1\eventsystemobj.cpp. Please contact Microsoft Product Support Services to report this error.

 

Sounds like a software problem. What services and programs are starting up in MSCONFIG? You may want to work your way through this. Temporarily disable all startup items from msconfig. Turn off all NON microsoft related services, Reboot to normal mode. Same issues?

I'm not much of a fan of Avast! (I think it uses up too many resources), it's free though, and you could uninstall it temporarily to see if that fixes some freezing issues.

Most likely though it's a combination of minor issues.

@ Windows search service: I'm not sure tbh.
@ d:\vistasp1_gdr\com\complus\src\events\tier1\eventsystemobj.cpp. Please contact Microsoft Product Support Services to report this error. : Do you have a DVD/CD inserted? Because it's reported as D: drive, which typically isn't your OS drive.

 

Windows Search errors are often down to permissions - typically because it's incorrectly set to search non-user folders or even the whole System drive.

Avast! is pretty light on resources, I'm looking at 1 Service and 2 processes using a combined total of 5MB of RAM, 28MB of commit with 1100 Handles plus a total of 167MB of drive space here.

I would suspect a bad driver or a problem with power settings, go through the disabling items as listed by thisisu and see if there's any difference.

 

Thanks for the help, guys.

Still no luck. I went into msconfig and disabled everything on the startup list, literally everything. Then rebooted into normal mode and 15 minutes later, total crash again. Only thing I had open was Firefox, at a plain ol' blog with no audio or video. Back in safe mode now as it's the only thing that's stable.

Also did some research on the "d:\vistasp1_gdr\com\compl..." error, apparently it's a known error that pops up everytime you boot into safe mode.

Any other ideas would be great, I am fully stumped.

 

You could try rolling back the graphics driver from within Device Manager, it might mean that the display is very sluggish but we're just trying to find some stability while trying to pinpoint the problem.

Do the laptop cooling fans spin up and down as they did before? Still pushing hot air out when it's working hard?

 

Still unsolved.

Tried rolling back drivers but no previous driver available, still just using the stock drivers that the laptop came with.

The fan seems to be just fine, still works and seems to be working appropriately.

The laptop is still rock solid in safe mode. Soon as I attempt to login in normal mode, the system seems to be bogging down. I just tried it again and opened task manager and watched the performance meter, it kept jumping between 3-100% usage. The files that seemed to be using up processing was setup.exe and svchost.exe. Don't know what this means or what, I'm just plain stuck. Anyone have any more ideas???

 

Ok, let's try LatencyMon, running it for 10 minutes or so should be enough to start picking out bad drivers.

Setup.exe? Where's this running from?