Windows 8 freezes and comes up with messages about programs not responding?

[Rae]

For the past three days my computer has been freezing at random times but normally when I am trying to do something like installing something for example. I have Windows 8 and a hp laptop which I bough almost exactly a year ago. Normally when these freezes happen my computer comes up with a windows message telling me that the thing I'm using has stopped responding. This ranges from firefox, to steam, to skype, Teamspeak and even windows itself.

After these freezes happen they normally return to normal after I chose to shut the thing down through the error message but sometimes the error message itself freezes and I am forced to shut down my computer. I have done a full system scan for viruses but none were found. I tried updating to windows 8.1 but after I installed it, it was asking me questions about my preferences but kept freezing, taking up to 20 minutes to respond and eventually froze completely so I am still on 8. I have plenty of free memory, I have only used about a 1/5 of it but I went through and uninstalled some programs I was no longer using but this made little diffrence and the freezing continued. I then looked on some help websites and tried to restore my windows version which was recomened on the windows help page however once I had gone through the long process of restarting my computer multipule times it came up with a message saying that it had not worked. I then disabled programs from running when I start up my computer and although this has made the start up quicker, it has done nothing to prevent the freezing.

I play a lot of video games and the freezing is preventing me from being able to install updates or play any of my games as they freeze also. Please help as this is irritating me greatly and also I am sorry for the poor spelling but my computer freezes when ever I use the spell check too.
I had to go to the suggestion by Geek squad and refreshed my windows as nothing else was working and my compeer continued to freeze and crash. But it was mentioned that it would show me a list of removed programs but this has not happened and only a few of my programs are left. Java has been removed and I can't acsse any of my libaries, when I try it comes up with a message saying that they can't be accessed and that they are safe to be deleted.