Laptop crashes when running applications

panjifh

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Apr 3, 2014
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I was trying to install ArcGIS 10..2 but the installation failed. The first time I tried, the process was rolled back so I made another attempt, turning antivirus and some other background applications off. But the installation failed again and this time my laptop crashed in the middle of the installation and thus the process was not rolled back.

Now, my laptop crashes about 2 minutes after I run an application. Even in safe mode, my laptop restarts 2 minutes after I run some applications (e.g., Word and Firefox). But it seems to be OK when no application is opened.

I tried system restore but somehow it didn't work. I ran chkdsk, sfc and memory diagnostics tool but no problem was found. Any help will be appreciated. Thank you.
 

cpsuperprosecrets

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Dec 16, 2013
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You probably have a virus. The worst case scenario would be you needing to get a new hard drive. I recommend that for that for those 2 mins your laptop doesn't crash, you back everything important up onto a external hdd. Then perform a clean install of windows
 

panjifh

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Apr 3, 2014
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I have been thinking about doing a clean install of Windows but was wondering if there would be a less painful way for solving this. Thanks for the reply, cpsuperprosecrets.
 

panjifh

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Apr 3, 2014
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I tried system restore but it didn't work, it told me to try another restore point but I couldn't find any that worked.

Ross, windows just freezes when I open some applications in normal mode. So far, it freezes when I open Word, Firefox and Thunderbird. In safe mode windows would restart when open these applications. It worked fine with Win Media Player, though.
 

panjifh

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Apr 3, 2014
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The problem apparently arose because of conflict related to windows preview pane. It was resolved by unchecking "Show
preview handlers in preview pane" in Control Panel / Folder Options / View. The conflict apparently involved Firefox and Thunderbird, as well. In fact, the problem started quite some time ago that an error message ("Woed has encountered a problem") appeared everytime I attached a Word document on emails, but the system never froze until a few days ago, after failed installation of ArcGIS. Thank you to everyone that tried to help.

Info: Win7 Pro, Office 2010, Thunderbird and Firefox latest versions