Freezing when idle Must force shutdown 7 Pro 32bit

For about a month, my laptop has been freezing after sitting idle for 5 to 20 minutes-random length of time. The cursor can be moved but nothing will open and sometimes will get the hourglass if i click on something. Less often, after trying to open something the cursor will freeze too.
Have to force shutdown. When in Safe mode it never freezes. Safe mode and safe mode with networking. Never has frozen while any activity (except, i tried setting windows media player to loop some music from one of my mp3 files... that did not keep it from freezing)
Have removed the laptop from the network since this started.

Bought laptop second hand and we've been using it for +-6 years with few problems. The OS is not original, the prev owner installed a retail Win7Pro 32bit (it is authentic, I have run MGADiag on it) but it will only show me the last 5 of the key(same with Belarc-last 5) I have a retail Win7 pro 32bit dvd that came with a 64 bit which i installed on another machine and was hoping to run a "repair install" but got the the END of the instructions (reading them, not running it) and it requires the key. I made an Image and saved to external hard drive, back in 2015. had hoped not to do that but seems I have reached the end of reasonable diagnostics.
ANY ideas before I go back to the dark ages of 2015? Such as, how to read binary.. how to save binary.


I have been searching for ideas on the internet and have tried the following:
Ran my AV and MalwareBytes : quarantined what they suggested
Set the desktop to "never sleep" and Disabled screen saver
Looked at Performance Issues which said: "Drivers are interfering with Windows resuming from sleep mode" filenames igdkmd32.sys and WUDFRd.sys that last one was in error logs a lot.
Start-up Repair says no start up problems
Uninstalled all programs and drivers that were new in this timeframe
Disabled some add ons
Clean boot - it froze
Cannot do a restore because i accidentally set my max size for restore point too small and lost the last restore point from before this started
Made certain all win updates were installed
Viewed event logs which are greek to me but there are thousands ! Even the gray heading on top says
"Number of events: 69,513 (!) New events available" that was july 19, about a week-in with this issue.
Some of those events were related to a USB device my spouse was trying to download a driver for, which I have since erased the driver download attempts.
Have run disk cleanup (which, I rarely do because i dont understand it... and this has been happening since right around the time i first ran a disk cleanup) But the hard drive has only 15GB of 75gb.

sorry this is so verbose. and thanks to anyone who is willing to read it.

There are two likely causes of this problem:
1. Some power setting is kicking in, freezing the laptop. Go into Power Settings and make sure that everything is set to prevent the computer from ever sleeping or hibernating automatically -- in other words, so that you will have to specifically tell it to sleep or hibernate. (I see you have already disabled Sleep.)
2. There is some program running in the background which is causing the computer to hang; and this program isn't running when you are in Safe Mode. You can see if this is the case by running MSCONFIG, going to the Services tab, hiding all the Microsoft services, then disabling all of the non-Microsoft services. Click Apply, then reboot the computer.

If #2 didn't fix it, then go back into MSCONFIG and re-enable all of the services that you disabled.

If #2 did fix it, then you'll need to re-enable all of the non-problematic services. Go back into MSCONFIG and re-enable one service at a time. Click Apply after each re-enable, then restart.
* If the problem returns, then the service you just re-enabled is the culprit. Disable it again with MSCONFIG, and make a note of the name of that service.
* Be sure to check all of the services, re-enabling all that you can, so that you don't lose some essential functionality, such as anti-virus.

If you like, you can now go to Programs and Features and uninstall the program that is associated with the bad service.

Thank you, Mr Phelps, for accepting the mission and offering the detailed instructions. In the end, I had to use that 2015 image.. funny to see what I was up to 3 years ago.
I will be saving your instructions for next time one of these computers acts-out.

spoonleg said:

Thank you, Mr Phelps, for accepting the mission and offering the detailed instructions. In the end, I had to use that 2015 image.. funny to see what I was up to 3 years ago.
I will be saving your instructions for next time one of these computers acts-out.

The method that I explained is good if your computer starts running slow. It allows you to figure out what is causing the slowness, and then stop that one item from running.