Sometimes the Dell scares me, other times its the POS I'm driving

Last Friday I booted up the system to do some picture editing so I could make a post somewhere. However, during the editing the system was updating AVG Free when it suddenly locked up. I didn't know what was going on. Maybe it was the recent USB device usage (I took the SD card out of the digital camera to grab photo files off it with my card reader) that messed it up. I've had the audio suddenly stop working until I had the system shut down, and then suddenly Oh I'd get to hear the shutdown sound.

At any rate, for the next half hour or so, the system kept acting up. Ignoring mouse and keyboard input for some reason. So I took the chance to unhook the Dell, open it up and blow out dust. Made sure connections on the motherboard were in place. Made sure the RAM modules were seated OK. And install that Sony DVD burner that I've said for a while I would put in so I could burn disks with Mom's system again. I upgraded the RAM 3 years ago, and finally it's got a burner drive better than the one that came with it and was flaky from the first few times we used it but generally worked well enough.

I have no idea what helped, but the system stopped locking up and stopped ignoring the mouse and keyboard. I tried a system restore only to tell me that it made no system changes. Eventually I ended up with a working system and AVG Free flipping out, so after enough scans and no problems I made it update itself and it ended up actually installing an update properly as well as setting down.