I don't do desktop stuff so I'm a little stumped.

It's a no-name PC which regularly crashes when writing emails in Outlook. Sometimes it's when using Excel too, but it can happen a couple of times a week with the email. It just crashes completely, doesn't respond and has to be hard booted.

It also fails to wake from sleep on occasion. Same thing, no response, so hard reset. Google searches show millions of results and so far I've had no luck.

The event logs showed errors with VolumeShadowCopyService around the time the crash happened but not much else. Fixes suggested turning off Crashplan's 'backup open files' setting and issues with a TeamViewer add-in to Outlook. So I changed Crashplan and removed the Teamviewer addin.

Whilst there have been no errors in the logs for the last two days, this morning it won't wake again.

There is no new software installed, no virus/malware, temps are all ok, but this has been happening for a few weeks now.

So what do you use to investigate this sort of thing ? Are the event logs worth bothering with ? Is it just a case of removing hardware/software and testing each ? Is there software I can install which will monitor what's going on ?

Needle in a haystack I know, but does anyone have any tips ?