Question Not booting properly and freezing, possibly overheating?

[amillionmiles]

So for a few months now, I've been having trouble with Windows 10 freezing up on me on a regular basis. It's an ASUS Zenbook UX391U and running pretty hot, but it's always been like that. I keep it elevated on a stand. A while ago, I opened it up, cleaned out the fan, and renewed the heat paste, and it seemed to be working better after that with the freezing happening a little less often. Usually, it works fine again after I let it cool down for a while. I often got colorful vertical lines for a moment after a hard reset before it started. But now I can't get it to work at all anymore. Safe Mode seemed to be working slightly longer after startup, and when I pulled up the task manager, it showed 100% disk before it froze up again. At one point, I was able to use Safe Mode long enough to attempt an offline install of Malwarebytes. However, it froze up again before the installation was completely finalized (even though it said 100%), and then it wouldn't boot anymore. Startup repair and automatic repair wouldn't work, fixboot didn't help, uninstalling updates didn't help, and chkdsk kept getting stuck in stage 4. I turned off automatic repair and got the following message:

Recovery
Your PC/Device needs to be repaired
The operating system couldn't be loaded because a critical system driver is missing or contains errors.
File:\WINDOWS\System32\drivers\MbamElam.sys
Error code: 0xc000007b

Google told me that the file belongs to Malwarebytes, and I was able to get back into Safe Mode by disabling early anti-virus launch, but then neither my mouse/touchpad nor my keyboard were working. I got them to work by disabling legacy USB 3.0 devices in the BIOS and restart into Safe Mode, but then after less than a minute, it all froze up again. Is there any way I can fix this without having to reinstall Windows? I need to get some files and my MS Word customizations before I can risk losing anything. I would really appreciate your help!

 

[popatim]

With the cover off, are the fans spinning? Especially the CPU fan?

 

[amillionmiles]

I haven't tried to start it with the cover off (I'd have to take off the entire bottom, and it's really dusty and humid here), but I can hear the fan spin. It gets pretty loud right right at startup. When I'm in the BIOS, it shows the fan speed and the temperature, which usually stays in the 80s then. A few months ago, there were some noises that sounded like the fan may have been stuttering and screeching a bit, as if something was stuck in it. I'm not 100% sure it was the fan though, and it didn't happen again. I don't think it was the hard drive though (but it could be). It's my first SSD, so I'm not familiar with its noises.

I was able to get rid of the faulty Malwarebytes installation, and I can boot normally now, but I usually have less than a minute before everything freezes up again.