Aspire 1670 instability problems

Recently my hard-drive had reached a limit in size and had less than 155MB of free space left, and my computer was crawling. I decided that this was a turning point and started uninstalling many programs that I did not need.

I managed to free up aprox 2.4GB of space (out of 27 available), but the computer was still crawling.

My next course of action was to defragment my hard drive, my memory, and also clean up the registry using registry mechanic.

This proved of no help at all, and so I also installed iolo System Mechanic and run a full system optimization.

The computer was still crawling so I decided to continue uninstalling more programs and now I have about 7GB of free space (30%+)

but the system is still crawling and in fact, ever since I uninstalled several programs, it seems to actually go even worse than originaly.

At random times the PC will lock up, and not even CTRL-ALT-DEL can bring up the taskbar to kill any process that halts it. Then, after a few minutes of total instability, everything will return to normal.

Also at random times, Explorer will reset, going back to a blank screen before beggining again, usually this can waste up to 3 minutes while I wait for explorer to properly reset.

Finally, at times the Windows XP style (I use the default blue smoothed) will too reset and go to a Windows 98 kind of style (with square grey buttons), and this too can take up to 3 minutes to properly reset and correct itself.

Out of 60 minutes using my PC, up to 20 can be wasted on waiting the PC to come back to normal, and this time I cannot blame HDD space or integrity (run several checks on both RAM and HDD and all are fine) and it is fully defragged (was 19% fragmented but now it's perfect).

Still the problems continue and on top of that, I managed to uninstall some of the Acer Manager programs and now I no longer have access to the FN button and cannot set the brightness, volume and other functions of my laptop.

Please help!

I use an Acer Aspire 1670, with Windows XP SP2 Home. I do not use any kind of third party themes. My PC has .NET 2.0 and several programs installed.

 

Try reformatting your system. I know that a full HDD is not a problem. My HDD of my previous laptop had only 100 mb left, and it till ran like a charm. Instabillity is caused mostly by a ****ed up registry. Unless you made a backup of your registry some time in the past when your pc was working properly, I would suggest you just throw everything of your HDD and do a clean install.
That off course if it's not a hardware problem.

 

Sadly that is not an option as I have many important files and no way to back them up...

 

purchase a external HDD and use it to back up all your files, which you should be doing it you have important files, music, pictures...

I use WD's My Book 500GB you can find it and others at newegg