I'm going to divert slightly here and ask an open question- why do people constantly say to run chkdsk from the recovery console? It's the same bloody program in the recovery console as it is in the actual windows program- well, not identically, it does have a few weird new switches and whatnot, but it performs the same task entirely; running chkdsk /r from the recovery console is absolutely no different then running it from windows and then rebooting and performing it during boot. The recovery console is painted as this magical pixie fairy land where programs have this magical ability to perform vastly different actions than their windows counterparts that are functionally identical. Unless you need to perform some sort of Recovery, you don't run the recovery console. I mean, think about it, it's even in the bloody name!
recovery console, hmm, perhaps we should only run it for something involving a recovery of some sort, like, say, fixboot, or fixmbr, and a few other kinky functions that barely anybody runs.
What about the Speed up my PC program? What would you suggest in it's place, if anything?
Nothing. In fact, the very concept of a application program to speed up your PC is absurd. It's basically the software equivalent of putting flame decals on the side of your car. Sure, you have this application that almost certainly has flashy visuals (why are these booster programs always skinned? None of them use the freaking default windows themes! And half og them just look like a freaking tootsie roll pop exploded on your screen. Anyway it's clear with most of them that they spent about four-fifths of the budget hiring bums off the street to draw icons that go against all UI guidelines as well as hiring blind incontinent ninjas to design the User Interface setup.
For example- compare a few applications- Malware-bytes, for example, is a very good malware removing tool that is often considered one of the best. It uses the standard window themes- the ones the user has chosen- you know, like any sane windows programmer should. compare that to Uniblue, or system mechanic "We don't care if the user chose certain user interface colours or what colours they chose! We will present them not with a standard windows theme-default skinned window, but instead we will create our own uniquely designed user interface that tries to capture the essence of elephant piss."
I mean, OK, some of the "good" programs do seem to skin their applications (I think superanti-spyware does, but to be honest that's the only one that comes to mind) Then look at the features of the operating system compared to many of these "booster" products.
Windows XP: built in defragmenter and disk checker
System mechanic: a defragmenter that uses made-up technologies and in fact just calls into the OS to defrag, and a disk checker, a UI designed by a A blind midget Jerry Lewis wearing a top hat (yes, my comparisons are starting to make 0 sense, it's what I do), and so forth.
Basically, none of the "features" of many of these programs are much better then the OS versions, and their User Interfaces should make you question wether you might actually have accidentally ingested LSD recently.
BC_P - Do you still want the data from Process Monitor & SpeedFan?
I had another power failure, but was unable to capture any data due to not shutting the program down and rebooting it again to invoke the new Backing Files log. I have since fixed that error.
if possible, just keep it running in the background, so that you'll be able to get a capture that get's the last few events. Process Explorer isn't very useful in this case, though.
However, a hard freeze like this is almost always (in my experience) caused by a hard drive problem- either that, or a hardware problem, which would hardly be reflected in the actions taken by software that process monitor logs.
Poll