PC Freezing terribly

My pc just recently started acting up. Every so often my pc keeps freezing up on me. When it does, it is completely unresponsive. It's not as if the program froze, more like everything just stopped; I have to restart everytime this happens.

I'm stumped as to what it might be. It happens alot when I try to play games or if I'm playing a video but it doesn't always happen then. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

Some specs would help.
Type,make, and model of machine.
CPU type
Amount of RAM
That kind of info all helps figure it out.

 

Hp Pavilion a6000n
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-core 4200+
4GB DDR2 SDRAM

 

Please help! My pc now freezes as soon as it hits the desktop. I was researching online for a solution and found something that spoke about faulty RAM so I tested running the system on each of the two sticks individually and that's when it got worse.

I had some memory from another pc which I knew was working and tried it out, same result. Could this be a power supply problem?

 

When you tested individually, did you use the same slot?
Try them again in another slot as the one could have a defective connection.

 

No, they were in different slots. I started it in safe mode and it worked long enough for me to back up some files. Right now I'm trying run some diagnostic software I got off a friend: The Troubleshooter.

 

Hopefully it won't be a bad motherboard connection to the slots.
Good luck.

 

When testing the memory it reaches 100%, then kind of stalls, nothing else happens. It looks like I might have to get some professional help here.

 

Have you been able to run malware scans or check for programs running in the background?
What does Task Manager show for memory usage?

 

It can't get that far as soon as it gets to the desktop it freezes. But I checked before it got worse and nothing came up. Nothing is running in the background that hasn't been in the background for a month or so, memory usage doesn't go above 45%.