Tell HN: System Restore Saved Me

Wow, major computer (win 7 lenovo laptop) problems, I haven’t had problems this significant in years. It took 6 hours to resolve, 6 hours of my life I will never get back. Sometime in the early evening google chrome just started freezing and crashing anytime I clicked on a link from another website. Web sites I visit a lot seemed to load ok (cached?), but linking from them to other sites seemed to cause the issue. I researched (on another computer), tried a solution, more research, more solutions. Disabling add-ons, virus and malware checks, etc. It was also happening with IE, some of the solution attempts seem to fix IE, but certainly not chrome. I even uninstalled and re-installed chrome to no avail. I tried booting into safe mode to do some troubleshooting, and guess what, my computer got stuck in safe mode and would not boot back in normal mode. I couldn't connect to wifi. What ultimately saved me (normal mode again) and fixed the chrome issue…system restore to 3 days ago…thanks to auto system backups!