My HP desktop keeps freezing and I have to turn off the power every couple of hours to reboot it. Why didn't/ don't I just get off and fix it...I have huge projects this month with drop-dead deadlines and they're not something I can do on my laptop and my 2nd desktop isn't set up yet. Of course if it all goes down like a house of cards guess I'd have no other choice <cringe>

There's numerous errors in Event Viewer but what is showing just before a crash is the performance monitor is corrupt - event ID LoadPerf 3011 & 3012. When I tried Performance Monitor Control I got a pop up "Unable to add these counters:
\Memory\Available MBytes
\Memory\% Committed Bytes In Use
\Memory\Cache Faults/sec
\Memory Cache Faults/sec (yes, it's on there twice)
\PhysicalDisk(*)\% Idle Time
\PhysicalDisk(*)\Avg. Disk Queue Length
\Network Interface(*)\Bytes Total/sec"

I started looking into troubleshooting and most of what I found relates to servers. Some fixes were as 'simple' as a registry change (...\Perflib Disable Performance Counters), then it got into rebuilding the performance counter library and lodctr /R and WMI... all that is way above my paygrade, so I ran Malwarebytes lol.

This PC has needed some serious TLC for awhile, and I'm not sure if this was the last straw, but a week ago I was trying to get my USB ports to work consistently to copy files to my 128GB flash drive (that's a whole other thread) and unchecked "Allow this computer to turn off this device to save power" for all 5 ports and it worked...! Until it didn't and there was a check in the power management box and once again, windows is intermittently dropping the USB drives.

I also tried to use ReadyBoost with finally usable ports because this PC is crappy slow (disk often over 50% with high CPU and memory) and constant messages about apps 'not responding', but of course that went south with the checked box. So 2 days ago I stopped using ReadyBoost ("Stop using this device") but I don't think my PC has figured that out yet because as of only a couple hours ago event viewer shows a Kernel-EventTracing error event ID 3 " Session ReadyBoost" stopped due to the following error: 0xC0000188" & Kernel-EventTracing error event ID 4 "The maximum file size for session ReadyBoost" has been reached. As a result, events might be lost (not logged) to file "C:\WIndows\Prefetch\ReadyBoot\ReadyBoot.etl". The maximum files size is currently set to 20971520 bytes."

There is also an event for "Session "CldFltLog" failed to start with the following error:0xC000022" Kernel-EventTracing error event ID 2.

And last but not least is a Server error event id 2511 "The server service was unable to recreate the share Pictures because the directory C:\Users\[name]\Pictures no longer exists. Please run "net share Pictures / delete" to delete the share, or recreate the directory c:\Users\[name]\Pictures." and indeed, there are folders for Documents, Downloads, Music but no Pictures - the pics still show up under This PC and OneDrive but thoughts of having my pictures at risk is a real trigger.

I'm not sure where to start much less in what order to check/change anything. I created a system restore before the USB power management change (1/8) and a system restore was created [by Windows Update] 1/11 for 'Windows Module Installer'. I didn't know if I should try that (my success with restore points is 50/50), change the PerfLib key in the registry, lodctr /R, run [some kind] of registry cleaner... CHKDSK /SFC /DISM... look at the 1/5 minidump... so many choices. Yikes!

I'd greatly appreciate any help with trying to straighten out/ prop up PC 1 while I'm hustling to meet the deadlines and get PC 2 up and running, foregoing my pie-in-the-sky plans to purge/ reorg my files & my office as I go.