windows crashing all the time

Hello, just wondered if anyone could help, my boyfriend and I are at our wits end with this - my laptop keeps crashing - have run malware (Malwarebytes) and antivirus (AVG) and system restore to before the problem started and uninstalled programs but no help. It is crashing between every few minutes to an hour with no particular pattern. It seems to be windows that is crashing, not the programs - because everything seems to be OK until something to do with windows gets involved - and when it crashes, the programmes seem to be running but windows is unresponsive and the taskbar has disappeared and ctrl alt delete does nothing. Problems seem to be around windows update or opera updates but not sure really. Tried everything for 2 days now and nothing seems to work, any help would be really appreciated!

 

Hi, welcome to MGs.

Can you give us the laptop specs, such as RAM, CPU, etc?
That way we can more easily pinpoint a problem.

Cheers.

 

The specs are - Intel Atom N270 processor running at 1.6GHz, 1GB of RAM, 80GB of hard drive and 1024MB of DDR2 memory. It's an Advent netbook about 18 months old. Running windows xp. Thank you, hope that helps...

 

Sounds like a virus to me. Opera crashes Windows Core? The virus looks like it's trying to disable explorer.exe, which provides the windows directory interface.
Run your laptop in safemode and try to diagnose the problem from there by running your antivirus scans. Post the logs to the malware location if it detects something.
If there is nothing, are there programs taking up lots of CPU or RAM? If so, revise your decision to continue to run them
If there are suspicious files your antivirus has detected, then post the logs to the malware section, and have a pro look at them.
Oh, and BTW, if you think Opera is to blame, uninstall it completely and get an awesome browser like firefox!

 

Several possibilities:
http://ezinearticles.com/?Troubleshooting-Computer-Freeze-(Lockup)-Problems&id=39981

especially numbers 4, 6 and 7