Windows 7 strange random freeze / lock up but not crashing

Question

My Laptop has been suffering from a very strange random lock up, here's how it happens.

1. There's no sign before the lock up happen, I could be doing anything. During the last few freezes I had I was doing things totally different.
2. All of sudden, the screen would freeze. It could happen all at once or partially (task bar, context menu) but eventually the whole screen would freeze in a matter of seconds.
3. When the freeze begins, there's nothing that I know of could stop it. Once I caught it when task bar freezes and tried to bring up Task Manager, it didn't work and my entire screen stopped updating I had to hard reset.

Now comes the strange part - when all this happens, Windows is not actually crashed. Which means I can still get some response from it:

1. If I hit Ctrl-Alt-Del twice, I can go back to Login Screen. However, that screen doesn't help me at all. I can't open Task Manager from there, hitting any key combination does nothing, If I log back on my user account by entering the password, I'd face a black screen with a working mouse cursor which does no good at all. I also tried to create a secondary user account but that doesn't work when the freeze happens either.

2. My mouse & keyboard (laptop built-in keyboard) actually still works - I know this because I have 2 PCs running at the same time and use Input Director (a software keyboard-mouse switcher) to share the input from my laptop to my desktop. When the laptop freezes, I can still operate the Desktop with laptop built-in keyboard and mouse connected to laptop.

3. Since I have 2 PCs running at the same time, when my Laptop freezes, I tried to connect Remote Desktop to the Laptop from my Desktop. Only on the first attempt, after entering username and password, part of my laptop prior to the freeze would show up for one second, and from the look of it, it switches to a larger resolution of my Remote Desktop setting. However one second later the remote desktop window would go black too. After the first time the desktop never come back either from laptop or using remote desktop (black screen with mouse cursor only).

4. The programs on my laptop are still running - for example the Input Director I mentioned earlier works, a virtual machine is still running (Linux, bridged network adapter, accessible with SSH), a proxy server is still running (tested with Browser on Desktop PC)

What I've tried so far:

1. I checked my laptop hard drive (INTEL SSD 535 240GB) with both pre-boot chkdsk and Intel SSD Toolbox, comes back clean.

2. I checked Windows Event Log, nothing was there during the period of lock up except a Kernel-Power log caused by me force shutdown the laptop. Technically Windows 7 isn't crashed so there's no BSOD logs as well.

3. I tried to free up some space for system drive, set page file to a fixed size. I have accidentally full filled my disk before, the only damage was some program crashed but that time my system didn't lock up and everything recovers after I freed up some space.

4. I checked all Windows Update are installed, and SSD framework is up-to-date as well.

5. I've confirmed there's no suspicion process / start up / task scheduler / service... on my system, I even ran a full-disk scan with AV software.

I can't find a way to reproduce this freeze intentionally, which means I can't even verify if a fix actually works unless it's proven ineffective by another freeze. So far everything I've done has been proven useless against this random freeze.

• I haven't installed any software recently (actually I run almost all programs in Sandboxie so nothing is really installed)
• I haven't tried to update any hardware driver (they were working fine since OS installation long time ago)

I'm so running out of ideas, maybe I'll just wipe the disk and reinstall Windows unless I can find a solution to this problem.

Update 2018-01-12:

I enabled crash on ctrl-scrlk and have successfully triggered it while Windows is running normally, however I haven't experienced any lock up since then. After posting the question I have Visual Studio and VMware Player updated, not sure if they're related to this problem (both of them almost always running on my laptop).