Random Freezes

For the past two days my computer has been randomly freezing. When it happens, the keyboard and mouse become unresponsive and the display becomes frozen, continually displaying whatever was on screen at the time. If any sound is playing at the time it freezes, then a single, continuous tone plays from the speakers. It occured three times yesterday and so far five times today. The last time it happened, I left my computer on for ten minutes and it still remained frozen, so I was forced to hold down the power button to turn it off (as I had to do with all the other times). I have no problems during start up, except each time I start up after it's frozen, it'll tell me Windows did not shut down properly (because I was forced to manually turn it off) and prompts if I'd like to start normally or in safe mode. After start up, it may freeze within five minutes, or may not freeze at all for several hours. Each time it's occured I've been doing something different; a couple of times I was browsing the internet, listening to music or watching a movie with Windows Media Player, once it happened while I was typing in Microsoft Excel (nothing else was running), another time it occured when I was only watching a movie in WMP.

Just before the freezing first started, I moved the computer from one house to another, so something could have occured during the two hour drive, or while I was taking it apart/setting it up, but I was very careful and don't feel this is the case. Before the move, it was working completely fine. Since moving, the only new things I've added/done to the PC is connect a printer, and change my internet connection from a wired connection to a USB wireless modem (new house doesn't have a phone line). I tried a system restore, rolling back all my settings to a couple of weeks ago, before the move when everything was working. However, 15 minutes after doing so, it froze again. Additionally, a couple of the times it has frozen have occured while the printer and wireless USB modem have not been connected.

The computer is two to three years old, and it has had problems before. (A few months ago I was getting random shut downs, which ceased once I replaced the hard drive with a new one and removed (what i think was) a faulty stick of ram.)

I can't really afford to buy a new computer, and I need it for university/work, so I'm really hoping someone knows something I can do to fix this problem.

My specifications are below, let me know if you need any more details.

Model: Compaq Presario SR5240AN Desktop PC

OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit edition

Motherboard: MCP61PM-HM

PSU: 250 W Max

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4600+ 2.40 GHz

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 6150SE nForce 430

RAM: 3.00 GB (2.87 GB usable) RamBo DDR2 (3 x 1.00 GB sticks)

HDD: WDC WD10 01FALS-00J7B SCSI Disk Device

Thank you in advance for reading through this and helping me out.

Edit: Used SpeedFan 4.4 to monitor the temperature during one attack, the maximum temperature never rose above 60 degrees celcius. I recently cleaned out the internals of dust also.

 

I also ran a full virus scan with the most recent version/definitions of AVG Free, and my computer was clean (for some reason there is no Edit button on my first post anymore, so I couldn't add this info into the first post).

 

Please note posts on this forum can only be editid for 10 minutes after posting (I think)

Anyway, What happens if you remove the wireless intenet dongle and use the computer then?

 

It's still frozen before when I've had it disconnected, so I don't think that's the reason.

I just ran a Windows Memory Diagnostic and it said there were no memory errors, and I ran Windows Update not long ago and installed all the updates. That was a couple of hours ago and it hasn't frozen yet. If nothing happens for the rest of today/tomorrow, I'll let you know.

Thanks for getting back to me collin

 

Okay, it froze on me three times last night, so I don't think it's worked itself out.

I've deattached, cleaned, and reattached each fan/heatsink, in case that was the problem, so I'm fairly sure that all components are properly attached. I reinstalled all my drivers, but that hasn't seemed to help either.