Hi - sorry this is going to be a ridiculously long post
I recently bought a new Sony Vaio with Windows Vista Business. I used it for about three weeks, installed a few games, office, ripped all my cds etc. without any problems.
The other day I left it on for a few hours - not connected to the internet - but when I got back I couldn't get it to wake from hibernation. Eventually I gave up and hard reset it, as I was out of ideas and needed to return an email. It rebooted normally as far as I could tell but after about five minutes explorer started crashing repeatedly. This continued for about twenty minutes. "Explorer has encountered a problem..." etc. until I rebooted (Start>Shut Down). The next boot lasted about two minutes before explorer crashes began again.
This time it froze up after about five minutes of crashes and I could only move my mouse. Ctrl + Alt + Del didn't work, and I had no option but to hard reset. Now I can usually boot up and it generally freezes between 10 seconds and ten minutes after logging in. I have disabled every process and service through msconfig/services.msc/etc. to no avail. I have tried running diagnostics etc. but of course it freezes up before I can finish. Occasionally I can push it out to longer without crashing but usually in that case it'll be something minor, like clicking, that freezes it up.
Unfortunately most of Windows' diagnostic tools don't work in Safe Mode. For the most part, I can browse and do things in Safe Mode without freezing up, though I have had one or two, possibly unrelated, freezes (these might just be due to trying to do things in Safe Mode that rely on disabled services?)
So, okay, I give up trying to fix it and get out the Recovery disks I burnt on day one. These run their first menu and I select an option such as repair/recover or whatever and I get a message along the lines of "Could not open the folder" and the computer reboots.
I'm assuming that I can probably just restore the whole thing to factory conditions from Windows if need be, and that's going to be my final resort, but for now I have two major problems:
1. the fact that the computer keeps freezing up and is basically unusable.
2. the fact that I cannot make backups no matter how hard I try. I connect my external hard drive, transfer as much as I can and then it crashes. This happens in Safe Mode as well. If it doesn't crash, the file transfer just freezes. I even tried running cmd "xcopy c:\foldername\ i:\ /e /i /h" or similar and it stopped transferring about 1/3 of the way through. On one occasion I pinpointed the exact file where it was stopping the transfer consistently on windows, cmd, and safe mode, but on the next try it stopped somewhere else. I'm at my wit's end. I've got my important data on a usb stick, but I wanted to save some of my music which is ripped from vinyl, and my OneNote notebooks which no matter how hard I try I can't transfer.
I've tried HijackThis, all the spyware tools, every diagnostic tool in the world, and nothing ever makes it all the way through without crashing, even in Safe Mode. Please don't tell me it's hardware
Apologies for the essay! If anyone can help me I'd really appreciate it.
Thanks
