Playing Minecraft makes PC freeze

Hello, fellow netizens and Windows 7 users! :)

My family is having a spot of bother with one of their computers. It's a Compaq 505B MT running Windows 7, of course; it has 2GB of RAM, an AMD Athlon 2 X2, and an NVIDIA GeForce 6150 SE GPU. You can find full specs for this computer here.

Anyway, if someone plays Minecraft on it, the game will occasionally freeze for about 5-10 seconds at a time starting after the first 5 minutes of gameplay, during which it runs smoothly, until after maybe 20 minutes it will lock up completely, and since I am a rather impatient person, I always give the stupid thing a hard shutdown after waiting only 5 minutes. Then, when I try to boot it up again, Windows just stops at that pointless screen where the glowing dots spin around to form the Windows logo (the good old one. ) The last time this happened my dad turned it on for me just before going to bed, and by morning, it had made absolutely no progress after the dots formed the Windows logo. I thought it would be a good idea to clear its CMOS, which made it work that time. However, it happened again just today, and it said something about that excuse for a graphics driver that nVidia gives us failing on me. I don't have access to it right now, but I will probably be able to post the message in a little while.

Thanks in advance, amigos, any help is well appreciated.

~Dumbbird

P.S. Should I consider getting an alternative driver? Open-source perhaps? Or would I end up like this guy trying to get them?

P.P.S. BTW, does this kind of stuff happen on Linux?

Hi and welcome to SevenForums,
2gb's of ram I'm surprised you can run a browser like Chrome on that little :)
Use Clean boot,
Troubleshoot Application Conflicts by Performing a Clean Startup
Click Start and type in the search box,
msconfig
Click on the suggestion on top or hit the Enter key,
Go to the Startup section and take some screen shots for a complete list,
Go to the Services section and on the bottom left Check the box to Hide All Microsoft services,
Repeat the screen shots,
See the links above my signature on how to take and upload screen shots here.