Machine is Freezing up

HP Slimline Pavillion running Vista Home has began freezing up after initial boot. It will run for about 5 minutes then freeze. Especially after starting an application like Firefox or IE.

Keep in mind it is only freezing after the initial boot.

I have been doing hard shutdowns and rebooting from lack of choice.

After rebooting the machine will run fine the rest of the day.

What is going on?

 

Have you scaned for viruses and spyware recently?

are you current with Windows updates?

Do you have all your latest drivers installed?

when did you notce this to start to occur? was it out of the blue or after installing a given software?

 

Hey Thom..thanks for your help.

I've always tried to be pc health conscious & run a clean machine. This is the 1st real issue I've ever had & I suspect the machine is dying, but here goes:

I ran 2 avg scans for Malware & cleaned a few cookies but nothing serious. Ran HIjackthis for another forum & they determined my machine is clear of malware & viruses.

Under advisement from the same forum, I ran checkdisk & for some reason it would finish & not report its findings, unless I just dont know where to look.

As far as recent software changes, the whole problem seemed to surface 3 weeks ago when I updated Firefox & backed up drive data to an external device. So I uninstalled/reinstalled Firefox twice & still experienced the same problem. However to this day there is an icon on my taskbar showing a mass storage device that is ready to be safely removed. I only have the keyboard & mouse attached to this machine.

Any ideas?



There is one unusual thing, I backed up my info

 

Ok, I attached then safely removed the external drive again. Indeed the icon went away only to return after reboot. What can I do now?

 

It only says High Speed USB 2.0. Its just an enclosure that houses the drive from my previous HP. That machine ran XP. Could there be a connection? There is only 1 main file on the external & that is all my saved data. I deleted EVERYTHING from my old drive except that.