Windows Died on me

It was time to do my weekly malware scan and I decided to start with Windows Defender; I got rid of Counterspy. I decided to do a full scan and W.D. just stood there, at 1% on the Windows Wallpapers directory.

I waited and waited, but it didn't move out of that directory. So I tried to stop the scan, but nothing happened, then I closed the W.D. window and it the W.D. icon was gone from the system tray (I had checked in the options that the icon will always be displayed in the tray).

I decided to terminate the W.D. process completely, and when I pressed ctrl+alt+del nothing happened (in Home Premium when you press ctrl+alt+del, you are supposed to be taken to a screen with a bunch of options, Task Manager being the last one). So i decided to right-click the taskbar to start task manager from there and then the entire taskbar froze.
Then the screen went black, which meant that the ctrl+alt+del buttons did work, but an error message came out, titled, 'Failure-Security options' and then something about failure to initialize security settings...I clicked 'OK' and then the computer returned to the desktop, with the taskbar still frozen.

There are three indicator lights on the front-left of my laptop, one for power, the other for battery charging state, and the last one for HDD usage.
The one for HDD usage was completely dark, even though Windows Explorer was half dead. Then, when i clicked on the desktop itself, it died too. Then i was forced to reboot.

My suspicions aroused and I decided to schedule a boot-time chkdisk scan for all my 3 drives (C:\ for windows; D:\ for personal data and E:\ was the recovery partition used to reinstall windows). CHKDSK found no errors on C:\ and D:\, but it did find and said it fixed file system errors on E:\.

Then I booted into windows and decided to do an error check up with HDtune on my HDD. Simultaneously, I started Avast! and began a thorough virus scan.

HDtune said 0.0% of my HDD was damaged and no viruses from Avast!.
Then I started 'IObit smartdefrag' to defragment my D:\ drive, because it had the most fragmented data and IObit had already defragged C:\

I also started Windows Defender to do a quick scan this time, and about 3 minutes later a distorted blue screen of death appeared and the computer rebooted.

I decided to boot into safe mode and as soon as all the drivers were loaded and the computer was preparing to start into the Welcome screen, a blue screen appeared for a split-second and rebooted. Then I decided to go into the Bios (Phoenix BIOS) and run its HDD test, which said that my HDD was fine too. In an HDD failure I had a few months back, this test would fail before reaching 10%.

I decided to boot normally, Windows loaded, and just before the Welcome screen showed up, a blue screen appeared for a split-second and then rebooted, after which this cycle continued to loop even at all the "Last known good config" modes. In the HDD failure, this would happen while windows was loading.

Startup Repair found errors, and could not fix them, but it did say that the root cause was "Unspecified changes to startup/system configuration" (can't remember the exact statement).

So I formatted C:\ and reinstalled Windows, and it is working well with no issues for now.

It is very unlikely that it is my HDD, due to the fact that it is brand new, only one diagnostic (CHKDSK) said that part of it was bad and although similar to the dilemmas from my HDD failure, these dilemmas are different in a way.

Is there a way I can narrow down to what is the cause of this problem?

For now I suspect this is caused by:
1. Loosely connected HDD.
2. Sound Card Failure (Audio Enhancements seem to be causing problems with the sound card and/or its drivers)
3. Faulty RAM
4. Damage to hardware and/or OS due to frequent illegal shutdowns (suddenly turning off computer without proper shutdown of Windows)
5. Short Circuit from the needle I dropped some time ago.
6. Overheating (although my laptop was positioned so that the fans would suck air from my Air Conditioner floor vent, which kept it significantly cooler.

Any suggestions as to how I might prevent this kind of issue from coming back.

 

You should've tried System Restore.
Anyway, reinstalling once in a while doesn't hurt.

Oh yeah and quit doing "frequent illegal shutdowns".

 

I did try, but System Restore said I had no restore points...And I remember enabling System Restore for C:\ and D:\.

I tried System Restore from Startup repair, but what startup repair and HP recovery manager do is create a whole new weird partition: X:\, which has about 90% free of 30mb and this incomplete version of Windows, just enough to get them to work.

What is weird is that X:\ has 90% free of 30mb and the Windows folder within has a little over 1 gb

 

Ok, the problem came back, so I downgraded to XP to test if the problem was the OS, or hardware, but now I cannot find the drivers for my graphics card: Nvidia GeForce go 6150 (NVidia stopped hosting them) and I don't have all the available modes (1280x800, etc)

Does anyone know where to find them?

 

Found them http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...ob-42641-1&lc=en&cc=us&product=1842078&os=228

Anyway... I will come back with Updates if the issue continues.

 

I would recommend only installing one virus checking program with firewall feature. Don't attempt to install multiples of such programs because sometimes they conflict and will crash your system. I only have Avast Pro on mine.