I always hear windows crashes/freezes too often. I always thought it was crazy talk though since I knew the following.
If it ever crashes just go ahead and open up the task manager and then go to the Processes tab find explorer.exe and end it, and then go back to the task manager, and in the Menu hit File, New Task (Run...), and then in the box it brings up type explorer.exe
Hope that helps someone, that's saved me from wasting my time, with restarting, waiting it out and other nonsense.