Yesterday I was transfering data files to my external HD when my laptop suddenly froze. Then a blue screen popped up about system dump prep. and I had to immediately shutoff my laptop. I restarted and moments after Windows came on and I logged on, the same thing happened and this time, it started to dump files. I restarted in safe mode and tried to do a system restore but it said there were no restore points. I then scheduled a disk check up to auto fix file errors and restore and recover any bad system sectors but the scan came back as clean... This morning, Vista was unable to start up so I had to manually restart the laptop where start up repair automatically activated in which it gave the option to restore to an earlier time before Vista could finally work. Now, everytime I start my laptop, Vista doesn't laod and I have to go through the above process each time but startup repair never finds any problems. To make matters worse, each time I try to empty the recycle bin, the icon displays deleting files but it just sits there with that screen and doesn't actually delete anything (almost like it froze). When I hit cancel, I get the picture below and it just sits on the screen and doesn't do anything.
I do not know what is causing this or how to diagnose this problem. My OS is Windows Vista Home. I also have ran multiple antivirus checks which all turned out negative so this is not caused by any viruses.
Please advise as to what may be causing the system dump and what I can do to prevent another occurence as well as how I might be able to solve this problem.
Thank you for your time. Your help is greatly appreciated.