Maybe others can comment, but I don't think your experience is typical. I have three windows machines, 2 with XP and one with Windows/7 (a laptop), and I have two Linux machines, one personal the other a webhost that I rent. Perhaps because I'm lazy I never log out, I never shut down, and I never degrag other than any auto-defrags that might happen. Crashes are extremely rare, at most maybe one a month across the five machines (and the crashes are always on windows machines). I suspect that if I rebooted them every day that they'd almost never crash.
I'm no Windows expert, but degragging daily seems extreme. Unless you're writing and deleting huge volumes of files daily it doesn't seem necessary. You might try not defragging for a while and see if things change for the better or worse.
If your problems are mostly browser related you might try switching to Chrome - at least it would tell you if it's a case of FF not playing nicely with W/7 on your particular machine.
Next time you trade in your laptop you might consider a Mac. We also have 2 Macs and are about to get a 3rd in the form of an iPad2, and they literally give us no problems whatsoever. The laptop comes up on-line within a couple seconds when opened, it goes dormant when closed, and it has none of the blonky Windows sleep behavior, also know as "What the heck, I think I'll act like I have absolutely no idea what's going on when I try to restart."
-- | Percy |
| EvC Forum Director |