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My desktop PC running Vista has frozen on me a few times of recent. I may be working and suddenly neither the mouse, or keyboard have any effect; or it is stuck on a screensaver photo when I come back from a break. Hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del for Task manager has no effect. All I can do is switch off the machine. Once I restart it works fine again until the next freeze which may not be for several hours, or several days.

Can any IT experts on here suggest what to do to correct problem?

Could be lots of things Jonathan, but I'd download Malware Bytes and run that to see if it picks up any syp/malware first, then check RAM memory.

Malware Bytes found 178 infected files, so maybe that was the problem - will see

Thanks Andy!

Freezing like that sounds more hardware related. One of my first guesses would be a heat issue. If you have a broken fan or a dusty case in which the CPU and other components aren't getting a lot of ventilation, your system could freeze. I would also pull your RAM chips and push them carefully back in their slots. Finally, I would look in your sys-log files for any entries at the time of the freeze.

after that, download, install and run CCleaner: http://www.ccleaner.com/ It will remove a lot of things in you pc that are no longer needed that may slow the pc down. Works great.