Programs constantly not responding, possibly Chrome related

I have a Dell XPS L501x laptop. A test showed that the hard drive was going to fail, so I had Dell replace it (it's under warranty until December). I installed Windows 7 on the new HDD and I've had problems basically since the beginning. What happens is my programs will hang, with the (Not Responding) message on the top of the window. This will last for anywhere between 10 seconds to a couple minutes. I called Dell again about this and was told that the problem was Chromium, my browser. I uninstalled it and the problems persisted with Firefox, so they told me to install Windows again. I did this and I'm having the same problems. I have Chrome installed now. One thing I've noticed is that Flash occasionally crashes, but this is a separate error message so I don't know how related it is. Chrome isn't the only program locking up. Word, notepad, and basically everything else I have open will lock up, but as far as I can remember this only happens when I have my browser open as well.

Any help is greatly appreciated. I've tried to look up solutions but I couldn't find anything that seemed to match my particular problem. I did not have this problem before my new HDD was installed but I can't tell if this is a software or hardware issue. I have 6GB RAM so that shouldn't be an issue.

I have MSE and nothing else and Windows is fully updated.

Have you tried running the programs in compatibility mode?

@Mellon- Is there no way to fully uninstall Chrome instead of having to reinstall Windows again? I can do it if necessary but I've done this multiple times in the last couple months and it's frustrating.

@James- No, I can try that. The thing is that the problem is intermittent, so I can go without problems for a good amount of time running programs in normal mode already.


Something else that I thought of that seems important: when the program locks up, it locks up the other programs at the same time. For example, if I try to load a page on Chrome and it freezes, if I try to load another page or go to Word and try to do something that has stopped responding as well. When the page loads everything will start working again at the same time.

It happened with Firefox before I reinstalled Windows the most recent time, but that could just be due to remnants of Chrome screwing things up. Thanks for the help so far, I'll probably reinstall Windows tonight if I have time.

I haven't had the time to reinstall Windows yet, but in the meantime I think I may have figured it out. Since I switched my power option from power saver to balanced I haven't had this problem. I can't remember if power saver was on the every time I've had this problem but if it was it could just be that my computer wasn't able to handle the processes while not going at full capacity. Fingers crossed that it's this simple but so far it's looking good.