Vist keeps crashing

I have a Dell Vostro 1500 with windows vista business, got it in september, its been fine so far but yesterday vista just randomly freezes and I have to force it to restart by holding down the power button.

Normally I have comodo firewall, avira antivir, spybot and rightmark CPU clock utility (though normally no management is selected).

In the past couple of days I've been using the new firefox beta minefield, I've used windows free registry cleaner and a registry defragmenter. Also a windows update automatically installed.

Yesterday whilst on msn it crashed 5 times in 5 hours getting more and more frequent after every crash.

I've tried a system restore to last week, and one from the beginning of February, the laptop crashed whilst I was running an a-squared scan after the first restore and crashed whilst running an antivir scan after the second restore. I have an old registry backup which I've now used and its been ok for the last hour but I'm worried that it'll happen again.

At the moment Ive backed up my uni work, my drawings, some of the programs Iv downloaded and my book marks, everything else is either on some other memory card or not needed. Im thinking of doing a re-install of vista from the CD.

So I'm wondering if there is anything else I could try before reinstalling vista?
also is there any other obvious thing I should backup before doing a re installation?

Thanks for any help, I really can not afford to have a laptop crash whilst Im working on my thesis.

 

You could try a memory test. If you press F12 at bootup and select Diagnostics, it'll run the built-in memory test which doesn't boot Windows.

 

If it hasn't crashed since the restoration of the registry, there is no need to fix something that isn't broken.

 

It take a lot to crash Vista. Have you installed a new program recently?

 

Actually, Vista crashes pretty often for me too, unfortunately. But my crashes are Blue Screens, not freezing. My memory tests out ok and everything's up-to-date. I suspect some driver is causing trouble, but I don't know.

I think you're probably right though that Vista itself is pretty stable, since plenty of people don't seem to be getting crashes. I think in most cases it's drivers and/or hardware issues.

 

Better pray Vista SP1 fixes your problem. 3 days.

 

i'd give registry cleaner and defragmenter a serious pass.

 

Visa rarely, if ever, crashes on me. I've got it pretty stable, despite some heavy tweaking. The only time Vista was really screwing up on me (BSODS, the works) was because I a couple of Windows Updates that crashed it. I ended up having to go through and install updates bit by bit until I found the culprit.

 

Yes, check event viewer. Click the start button, and type eve on the search bar.

You will see Event Viewer pop up on the start menu, so click on it. Look for errors on the Application, and the Windows Logs that happened around the time Vista crashed. If it's a program giving you problems, chances are that if you reinstall that program afte doing a clean install on Vista the problem will come back.

 

Well it hasn't crashed since I reverted back to my old registry but i
I'm going to root through event viewer to see what caused the crashes. I did the memory check, the full 30 minutes one and it passed that. And as for recently installed programs, i did install a tunneling software called hotspot which I've removed. Im not going to touch the registry stuff now, I think that must have been the problem.
Thanks for all the help guys!