Windows 7 randomly freezes

I'm trying my hardest to give Windows another chance. I switched to a Mac around the time 98SE wasn't cool anymore. Now, I'm back in school trying my hand at other things and I thought, oh, what the heck, lets build a pc.

So I did. Everything went fine, until I installed Windows 7. It worked fine for a while, but all of a sudden it wanted to freeze (clock, mouse, cursor, everything). I had no BSOD or anything. I reformatted the HD a few times, partitioned, one part XP, the other 7. Still, it freezes. At first, it would only freeze when Windows wanted to run it's updates. So, I turned auto updates off. Then, it would just randomly freeze. I tried checking the Event Viewer but couldn't find anything that made sense to me.

XP runs fine. I do everything in XP: Visual Basic, my Real Estate software, Komodo, run multiple apps at one time, play games, whatever, it works. No freezing, nothing. I just don't get it. I don't have the PC IQ yet to figure it out. Heck, my girlfriend was playing Sims 3 on 7 for hours and it worked fine. Then I would run an app, browser, or anything and it would freeze 15 min. in, or 1 hour in.

Any ideas on how I can isolate the problem and fix this? I like 7. I really do want to give Windows another shot. Just tell me what I can do.

Right now, I have XP running on one partition and 7 on another.

All other specs should be included in my profile.

Thanks.

edit: i have updated the BIOS as of two weeks ago.

Will that work with having two partitions?

Did a clean boot per instructions. Tried to do Windows Update, same result: freeze.

Event viewer shows nothing happening at the time Win7 froze. There are also no conflicts or anything in the Device Manager.

Any other ideas?

I ran the Memory Diagnostic tool and it said that it did find errors. Is there any way to pull a log? How do I know what exactly is wrong?

As soon as I posted that a dialog box popped up saying "Your computer has a memory problem" How the heck do I figure out which RAM chip is bad?

For kicks and giggles I ran the Resource and Performance Monitor and it didn't come back with any issues (except the fact that I have Windows Update disabled because that's what generally causes the freezes).

They originally started happening here and there when I would run the Windows update. I would need to do a hard reboot. After a while, I just reformatted the HD and started over. I would partition the drive and install XP first, then 7. I successfully ran Windows update for a while, the last time was back on 11/28, then it just started freezing again. I could run 7 fine, or so I thought, as long as I didn't do Windows update. Then, around Dec 1st or so, it decided to freeze after I closed Firefox, then another time when I was using IE, I think. It's running fine now, but if I decide to run an update, it will freeze.