Thanks guys, a friend came by today and said he thinks my mother board is dying.
We took the tower out in my garage, opened it up to blow it out but it was very clean, I cleaned it last year. He popped the Ram card out to see how much it was and wiggled my graphics card that I installed in the last year, we closed it back up and hooked it back up to the screen. Then he saved everything from my PC onto a 2TB Seagate portable drive he gave me just in case.
After he left I re-installed Mozilla Firefox and it's working great.
BUT, I'll know in the morning after my PC goes to sleep tonight, if I can wake it up from my key board. That's when things have been going south.
It's an 8+ year old Dell with only 4Gb Ram. It's served me well but it's time to move on/up. But $$$$$$!
Not sure what would make a determination of a mb going from your description. If the box is 8 years old replace the battery on the motherboard. Go to dos prompt and type msconfig
When it opens you can turnoff processes that launch on startup. This will free memory. Check your hard drive available space, you need to have 20% free space. If not move some things to another drive. Personally, i never use the drive windows is installed on, i either create a partition or use a separate drive. Currently I am using solid state drives for OS and programs and use another drive for storage.
I like the speed and I have never liked my downloads going to my main drive.
Signs of a bad motherboard usually begin with something not working like your network port or onboard video. Meaning something quits working.
I am not a fan of registry cleaners. If the Dell is that old it should have a restore disk. You could run this and after it boots renove all those silly package programs and get to the basic os. Then start running updates till you are current. Install the software you need.
After you should be good for another 8 years. A new computer is nice, but simply a waste of money if you do not need it for anything. If you need 64 bit processing, a lot of newer programs run best d some will no longer run on 32 bit systems.
I have a computer at work that runs windows 2000. Yes it is old but it does what I need. I also have a dual processor Mac Pro with dual 27 and 16 gigs of ram, a 512 ss drive and 3 mirrored 3 tb drives in a raid array.
I have tablets, iphone, and a couple dual processor Windows one of which is our work server. I have windows 10, 8.1, 7, xp and 2000 running. There is a lot more.
My point for saying all of this is if your computer was doing what you needed it to do before the problem started if you fix the problem you will not need another one.