Need some help - again - please

Hello!

As my son is away on some or other assignment, I cannot ask him to help me with this problem, so I'm hoping you good people can do so, please.

I'm running Windows 7 (although I still prefer XP!) and intermittently when I go out of a program and want to open another link, everything seems to hang or freeze up and I have to restart to get it going again. I find this extremely annoying and I don't know what causes this - as I said, this problem is intermittent. No problem restarting. I regularly download all my updates, so I don't think it can be that.

Could the problem perhaps be something wrong with my registry? I don't want to mess around with that as I might just cause a humungus problem in that area. Could you please recommend a good free program for checking registry and other systems to eliminate problems? I saw RegCure on the net and did a scan, and it came up with something like 4000+ errors on my system, BUT the catch is that I am expected to pay something like $40 to get a clean-up done, and I just don't have that kind of money, being a state pensioner. And I also don't want to use something that has not been recommended by experts - so please can you help me here? I would like to install a good program to do regular scans on my system to keep it running well.
Would be extremely grateful for your help/advice.
Thanks in anticipation.

 

I think TimW's comment is short for...don't go the registry route to attempt to solve your problem...

The problem with diagnosis and repair when it comes to Windows (any version) is that simple to use tools aren't readily available and easy to find. There are some, but it would be nice if using them was simpler...

First thing I would do is take a look at your system. Could you post a little bit about this PC? If you could, please provide the following:

Processor type
Amount of RAM memory
Main drive size and amount of free space
Which programs give you trouble (IE Explorer, others?)
Do you have a Microsoft DVD copy of your version of Windows?

If you need help finding any of this, please let me know

 

Are you getting any blue screen errors when running the machine? Are there any errors in Event viewer? Copy & paste the following: %windir%\system32\eventvwr.msc /s in Run (Press Windows key and 'R' key (do not need to press the shift for a capital R, just as I posted).

From there in the event log, are there any errors in "Windows Log, System"? Also, what are your system temps running at? You can use Core Temp, which you can download from here at Major Geeks, or at http://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/ Speccy will also show system temps, and system info also.