PC freezing woe

Just wondering if any charitable person can help out as I'm completely stuck.

My 2 and a half year old PC was getting increasingly buggy recently so took the decision to back everything up and reinstall windows from scratch.

Got everything back up and working ok but now I am the victim of frequent 'freezes' where everything stops and the only solution is to reboot.

Assuming I was missing some driver or other I spent ages configuring everthing but no luck. After a bit of research decided the problem could be hardware related. So far I have:

swapped out the RAM
changed the video card
tried a different hard drive

with no success. Also installed something called 'Speedfan' to see if things were overheating but I don't really know what I'm looking at. CPU core temp seems to be around 40C but when I ran a torture test it went up to 80C which seems rather high. It didn't freeze during the torture test though and generally I'm not running CPU intensive applications, just downloading torrents and stuff when things freeze up.

Can anyone give a hint regarding what I could try next?

Thanks

 

Can you provide clearer / more precise info in respect of these freezes. Is it across the board in terms of software which you use or specific to one application, ie does it freeze if you play games, listen to music, edit photos video, word, etc...... You post seem to point the finger solely at your browser.....is that what is freezing.

[EDIT]: Torture test is not part of Speedfan, it is part of Prime95 which is generally used to test cpu stability when o/cing a system.

 

Many thanks for the reply - apols for the late response.
PC is still freezing - not so much during browsing the web, but if I download a large file, or start a torrent, it will reliably go down within 10 mins or so. As I say, there is no BSOD, and it isn't completely stable even when I'm not downloading a thing - if I leave it idle for an hour or two and then come back, it may well have frozen, but it will definitely have frozen if I'm running torrents etc.

Since the last post I've done some more fan cleaning, reseated the heatsink etc as symptoms seem consistant with random overheating. However, according to Speedfan and my bios, CPU temp isn't sky high. Because of the torrenty connection I've done all sorts of diagnostics on my hard drive, and even swapped it out for an old one, but still froze within 30 mins.

Is it worth changing my power supply? Could it be a faulty MB? Or something else I'm overlooking? Although PC was buggy prior to my reformat, it didn't crash with such frequency. By reinstalling everything from scratch (twice, as I tried a different HD) I thought I would eliminate software probs, but who knows?