Computer freezes randomly

I have just installed Windows 7 Professional on my PC. Although my computer is fairly old and doesn't have a great deal of RAM/CPU power, I ran the utility that came on the DVD to check if my PC could run Windows 7 and it passed everything.

The computer previously had Windows XP and ran fine (if a little slow) and I reformatted it as it was becoming ridiciously slow are startup and had some problems updating.

After installing, when I start up the machine, the "Starting Windows" screen with the Windows logo flickers strangely - the Windows logo and the text appears on the left and right as well as in the middle, definately not right. After that Windows starts up as normal.

As well as that (which isn't too much of an issue) I get random crashes after anywhere between 30 seconds and an hour, where Windows just freezes. I can't move the mouse or do anything but turn my PC off by holding down the power button.

I initially thought it was something to do with my graphics card drivers due to the flickering screen but I have updated all my drivers in between crashes and there has been no difference.

Can anyone help with this?

Could be your graphics drivers. Check in the device manager if you have the latest ATI drivers for your card. If they are outdated you can get the latest ones here:
Drivers & Support | GAME.AMD.COM

Javierwar said:

Could be your graphics drivers. Check in the device manager if you have the latest ATI drivers for your card. If they are outdated you can get the latest ones here:
Drivers & Support | GAME.AMD.COM

I have updated ALL of the hardware drivers, and I still get the same problems.

I am currently running memtest86 to see if there are any errors with the memory.

Sorry I overlooked that you already checked that.

What I find a bit worrisome is that you say that you PC ran XP a bit slow. With 2GB Memory and a dual core it shouldn't have.
Additionally to the memory I would check also the HD, just to make sure it doesn't have any bad sectors.

I just ran memtest86 and that showed no errors with the memory.

I also just ran Seagate Seatools to check the hard drive and it showed no errors with the hard drive, either.

Surely if there was something seriously wrong with either of them, XP would have had similar problems?

All the critical errors say "The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly." but no information on what is causing it.

I am scanning like you said above, hopefully the PC will not crash before the scan finishes.