Unrecoverable freezes with Inspiron 1520 (even in safe mode)

Well, the title already gives the gist of my problem here. A couple weeks or so ago I had my first every freeze on my Inspiron 1520, after which it happened once of twice a week. Originally I thought it might be a problem with the power settings, because up until recently it only happened when I had my battery unplugged and running on balanced or power saver mode.

Anyways, a couple days ago it did this again while the battery was plugged in, so I restarted. This time windows wouldn't eve load, so I restarted again, and long and short I ended up doing a system restore which didn't help at all. Waited a couple hours, tried again and it got into windows then froze up again in 5 minutes, but since then I've at least been able to consistently get it to load in safe mode.

Since running in safe mode, I've done a disk check, tried to do a virus check (froze before it finished, took too long), and checked into all my drivers, which are (supposedly) up to date. My computer still keeps freezing for no apparant reason (ie. sometimes when I'm not even touching the computer for a few minutes, sometimes when I have nothing open, etc.) and I really have very few ideas at this point. I tried to do the dell diagnostics, but when trying to boot from the cd it froze again.

I'll keep looking around, but I can't seem to find anyone with a similar problem, so any help would be appreciated. Here are my basic specs (sorry for the long winded post)

Inspiron 1520
Intel T7300
2GB ram
Nvidia 8400GM
trulife 1200x800 screen

As a probably useless note, the last program I installed before the first freeze was Thunderbird

 

I don't know what could be going on, but have you tried checking Microsoft's error reports in the Control Panel?

Probably if I were you I'd end up backing up any personal stuff on there, and then try reinstalling and see if that fixes it. Actually, call Dell first.

 

I think he did that already.

 

This isn't a useless note. The first thing I'd have done is uninstall Thunderbird to see how the system reacted without it.

 

I'll try uninstalling thunderbird, but I just naturally assumed that the fact that it could even freeze before windows has loaded (froze during a dell diagnostic test this morning, booted from cd) meant it wasn't a software problem.

As for the reinstalling thing, that's a bit of a problem seeing as my computer doesn't stay unfrozen long enough to backup my files. I'll try and do small chunks and see if I can get enough stuff moved.

Also, I was reading the dell forums, and someone with a similar problem did a BIOS flash and the freezes stopped. If worse comes to worse I'll risk that, but if my computer freezes in the process I assume I'm ****ed royally.

 

Ouch, dude. When it gets this bad, you just try to get your stuff off there and redo everything.

 

Yeah, I guess so. It just sucks because I'm a computer science major at the university of Waterloo, so, computers are a little important here, lol. At least there are only 2 weeks of class left.