Last Thursday, whilst on a site I am frequently on and never a problem, suddenly my pc crashed taking me to the blue screen. I had done nothing, hadn't installed anything new. I manually turned off the PC, which I am never sure I should do when the blue screen says it's performing it's physical dump, but that's what I do when I see this happen. I rebooted the system, and it was fine for the remainder of the day, but because the room I work in gets extremely hot during this hot spell (which I wish was over), it was too uncomfortable in the room, so I turned the pc off, till later in the evening.
Following day as there had been no mishaps, I was back on my PC and it crashed again - blue screen etc.
Since then the computer was apparently working ok, or so I thought. I updated all of my virus protection, malaware etc - as I prefer manual update to auto update - across the board. I even deleted unnecessary files, I also did a disk cleanup. For the next few days all seemed well.
Until yesterday, Monday, when it crashed at just after 6pm. Frustrated I left it alone, came back upstairs at around 10pm and turned it on again. The only difference this time was that I saw something I've never seen before.
A message displayed on my screen Windows Installer encountered a problem at 18.21 and has closed DEP.
So it was turned off. I have never seen this before, and I wasn't installing anything, or had done anything different from usual. I believe I can turn DEP on for selected sites, but surely this would be a pain if I had to do this all the time. Particularly, since I've no idea what happened.
I have lots of questions, but this will do for now folks - hope someone can give me a likely scenario as I'm mystified. I have XP Pro with SP3 installed.