Google is of no help right now, I'm trying to figure out the problem myself but I would like some feedback as multiple brains are better than 1. (Windows 8 btw)
I will be doing something simple, such as using my browser, and windows will randomly stop working. Of course, I never notice because I have my taskbar hidden, so I keep using my browser with no problem. I go down to check my taskbar for whatever reason, but it won't come up and my mouse will turn into the loading icon. Moving my mouse to the corners doesn't bring up anything, and the windows key does nothing. CTRL+ALT+DEL will work, but when I do something like choose task manager, the screen goes blank except for my background color and does nothing, forcing me to manually reboot. CTRL+SHIFT+ESC does nothing when it's like this.
I'm not sure if this has anything to do with it yet, I'm still looking into it, but it said that my computer would restart in 1 day to install important updates before the first crash like this. Thinking that the updates wouldn't happen yet, I force restarted. The updates began installing and restarted it again, but it crashed on this restart and windows gave me a message saying it was collecting info from the crash etc. and restarted again. Went through the whole configuring updates and finally booted again. Then the weird crashes started happening once every 5 minutes. The last time, I let it sit for a while and it seemed as though windows restarted, even though I was using the browser the whole time.
So yeah, I'm looking at the error report from when it collected info, and trying to deduce the cause. Current potentials: failed/corrupted update; a certain background program or 2; windows sucks ass; possible virus; my webcam somehow doesn't agree with windows.
UPDATE: I've narrowed it down to: bad update, windows sucks dick, my webcam. Kinda leaning towards the webcam though, it seems to freeze up like that most often when its on..