Howdy hotsub:
funny you should say that.
you didn't mention the make/model of your hard drive, that would be helpful to know. but according to the Gateway page, your BIOS date says that laptop will be 3 yrs. old this July. Hard drives in laptops typically fail between 3-5 years; right AFTER most extended warranties expire. I worked on a Acer aspire laptop last year in December for about 5 weeks and went through removal of all non-essential startup programs as you did; found a bad battery-replaced it. windows still froze. all the tests i ran showed the Motherboard was overtemped *cooked*, so I replaced that. windows still froze. after getting help on the online tech forums, I finally had no choice but to replace the hard drive. I ran restore points, reformatted the hard drive (both high level and low level), reinstalled windows multiple times. Everything. Information in the Event Viewer and System logs were inconclusive, and none of the experts would tell me to replace the drive--but I did. And being one of the toughest problems I've worked on in 25 yrs. it finally solved the problem!
The original hard drive passed every single test I could throw at it; and said it was ok. Windows reinstall seemed to work and the system booted fast and all the programs worked. However, when I returned to customer; it still froze up 6-10 times per day. Nothing I tried worked until I replaced the hard drive. That's stayed fixed since Jan. 2nd of this year and still running ok.
The point I'm making is that hard drives in laptops get banged around a lot more than in desktops because they get physically moved around a lot more than desktops. Hard drives in laptops are designed like I said for 3-5 yrs. But, I've seen hard drives fail in laptops from anywhere from 2 months to 10 years. An awful lot of them fail at 13 months, 25 months, and 37 months; coincidentally right after 1 yr., 2 yr., & 3 yr. extended warranties seem to expire. I've probably done a dozen laptops with failed hard drives in the last year that were between 2 yrs. old and 4 yrs. old. It's the number one cause of laptop failure. Motherboards and display screens also fail, but not nearly as often.
You have a couple of choices. One is take your laptop to an A+ certified computer technician or to a reputable computer store such as Best Buy-Geek Squad who employs certified technicians. Have them test your hard drive out for you. It will cost you $60 or more, but if they find it's defective, you can replace it and have them do for you and move all your personal data over from your existing drive to the new drive. And if you buy the hard drive from them (depending on which Store you go to), they will not charge you for the data transfer. Just the cost of the testing $60, plus cost of hard drive maybe $50. A $100+ repair unfortunately.
The 2nd choice is to DIY, and test the hard drive yourself, make the determination it's bad, buy the new hard drive at a computer store or online and replace yourself. Of course this is the cheaper option. If you've never done this before, you'll probably want to go the above router and have a certified computer expert assist you. If you've got some computer savvy and want to try, I suggest you borrow the UBCB linux tools disk from a techy friend and run the "GSmartControl" program to test your hard drive. You can also download the windows version (if your laptop will run long enough without freezing to run the test) at:
Link Removed. Run both the Short Test and Extended test on the internal hard drive. Even if it passes, there's a good chance the hard drive is the culprit and will still need to be replaced. However, if it does fail one of the 2 tests, then there's no doubt about it--the drive is faulty.
Viruses can also mimic hard drive freeze problems, as Mitchell_A mentions; the Malwarebytes program is excellent, and you can also scan with TrendMicro Housecall and RootKitBuster. I suggest you run both in SAFE MODE. If you don't know how to run SAFE MODE, message me back and I'll give you directions.
My money is on the hard drive given the symptoms, and the solutions you've already tried. Diagnosis with manufacturer software tools such as DataLifeGuard for Western Digital drives are also helpful; but not always conclusive.
Another thing you can try, which I did, is to borrow a working SATA laptop drive from a friend or techy, and install Windows from the Gateway recovery disks that came with your laptop on it. If Windows installs *you probably are running Win7 right?* ok and runs for a week with no freezes, you have identified your original hard drive as the culprit! This is how I solved my Acer problem.
Good luck with resolving your problem and message me back here with any more questions or results of tests I suggested.
BIGBEARJEDI