Black Screen of Death combined with desktop freezing

Let me start at the beginning of my current saga.

1. I received a blue screen of death about 4 months ago, the first time I had ever received one before. I restarted my computer and everything has been fine since then.

2. More often than not, I close my laptop at the end of the night and let it hibernate, only shutting it down every once in a while or restarting for windows update. Last night, I opened my laptop and had a few Chrome tabs open, as per usual, and everything was fine. Then for some reason everything froze. A freeze that locked everything up. I want to attribute this to windows update reminding me to restart after my previous update. I proceeded to force shut down and restart, then the black screen of death hit me. Just the mouse on the pitch black screen. Prior to the initial black screen of death, a popup occurred wanting me to end the process of "Windows Operating System" if memory serves. Since the computer is frozen, rarely can I click cancel on this. (Note: this popup will continue to happen later on)

3. I did a system restore to the first previous date at the F8 screen upon startup. It was successful but same result. I attempted further system restore points to the 3 other restore points but they all failed.

4. Several attempts to boot into Safe Mode were unsuccessful. Further attempts to boot into the regular startup resulted in being stuck at the Black Screen of Death.

5. Finally calling it quits for the night, I started back again this morning with a chkdsk from the F8 screen upon startup. It came back with the first stage reporting: "2111 large file records processed, 0 bad file records processed, 2 EA records processed, 53 reparse records processed." All other 4 stages were clear.

6. Following this, I booted into Safe mode successfully and was able to save important documents and went to msconfig. There, I did a diagnostic startup with nothing running, rebooted and the computer worked correctly. I switched over to selective startup with very little running upon startup and everything was fine. This makes me think that it is a software issue.

7. I eventually got back into my normal startup that loaded everything on startup. The result almost looked good but then it froze once more, turning into the Black Screen of Death.

I am unsure where to go from here. I will post my computer's specs below. Thank you for any and all comments and support.

HP DV8t-1100, Windows 7 Professional x64

Processor (CPU)
Type : Intel® CoreTM i7-720QM Quad Core processor
Speed : 1.6GHz with Turbo Boost up to 2.8 GHz
Cache : 6MB L3

Memory
RAM : 8GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm)

Graphics Card
1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 230M

Also, when the Black Screen of Death occurs, no keys work. Not ctrl-alt-del. Not shift 5 times. Holding the power button to shut down is the only thing to do.

I disabled everything on startup through msconfig except the basic files for operation and am slowly loading things back one by one. It looks like something that loads on startup is screwing it up. Attached is the .ZIP file

Should I do a small or kernel dump file?

My default was a kernel. I followed the dump files instructions but didn't receive a prompt to restart my computer.

Chris2005 said:

JoshL90 said:

My default was a kernel. I followed the dump files instructions but didn't receive a prompt to restart my computer.

If no options were changed, I don't think it requires you to restart... if you changed any options but didn't get the restart prompt, I'd manually restart the computer.

Of course, in the article it says "If prompted..." so it might depend on certain things, I don't know for sure.

That makes sense though not sure why there weren't any dump files included in the zip file that was created.