Lenovo Z70 Crashes All The Time

So I got a Lenovo Z70 8.1 PC from my cousins estate. It constantly crashes with a message "Windows Internet Explorer has stopped working". It does it every 15 minutes or so, even if it's just sitting there doing nothing. I go to Task Manager and see that the cpu, memory or disk is suddenly at 100% and obviously the pc takes 20 - 30 seconds to do anything. I recently reformatted the drive and set the pc to factory conditions. That made no change. Can someone please help me before I take a sledgehammer to it.

 

When I used IE11 on Win8.1 exclusively, I would get the same every so often, every day. When I looked in event viewer, it referenced an add-on I was using for download acceleration. I updated to a new version of the add-on. It help, but not completely. I installed a couple other browsers. Now I only use IE where I know it works and use the others as fits. Even where IE works, I find times when it won't connect, so I use one of the others while IE is acting up. Some browsers just seem to work better than IE. I use even some smaller name browsers. SlimBrowser, SlimBoat, FireFox and Opera are some common ones I use. Variety seems to work best for me.

 

I agree with Imandy Mann,IE11 is a bit of a nuisance- I have found Pale moon very good
http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/pale_moon.html

 

If the issue persists after reinstalling a clean copy of Windows, I would download and install either Seagate's SeaTools or Western Digital's Data Lifeguard. Before running, be sure your data and files are copied, backed up or cloned to an external drive.

Temporarily change your Power Options so the PC hard drive, sleep and hibernate times are set to "never" while running it plugged in. Remember to leave the screen lid up so the PC won't shut down or hibernate on its own while the test is running.

Open the program, highlight the drive, click on available tests and choose "Long." A long DST (Drive Self Test) can take up to 8+ hours to complete on a 1TB drive since it scans every sector. The benefit is it often catches impending failures that "SMART" or "Short" tests miss. If you either get a fail message or the program appears to stick on one or more individual secors for an abnormal amount of time, your next test should be replacing the hard drive with a known good one and testing its progress for a few weeks.

A final note: Even if the existing drive technically passes, upgrading now to a Solid State Drive will make your boot times and program response incredibly faster. If you store very little, a 240-250GB SSD is around $90; a 480-500GB is about $160. The boot time on my 5 year old Lenovo i5 notebook smokes brand new i7 models with regular hard drives sold where I work. Yes, I've timed it.

Hope this helps.