Windows 7 - Major Freezing Issues

Hi everyone,

This problem is sort of related to my desire and inability to play games, but I guess you'd call it a general performance issue so I'll post it here, feel free to move it if it is in the incorrect forum.

Anyway, a few days ago, after reading many reviews saying that the Windows 7 RC was fairly stable, I decided to make the jump from XP 32-bit to Windows 7 64-bit.

Upon installing, I noticed that at random times my whole system would freeze, and would require a hard reset. I wouldn't get any sound, no lagging beforehand, it would just stop dead and not do anything. Hard resetting was the only way back in. Sometimes these freezes would happen after 2 minutes, sometimes after 20 minutes, sometimes after an hour. One thing was clear however, it happened almost instantly when I tried to play games.

I have tested games like Far Cry 2 (ran fine for about an hour, didn't freeze, I just stopped playing), Diablo 2 (ran fine again, no freeze), Half-Life 2 (played it for about an hour total, at which point it froze and needed resetting 3 times), and finally, World of Warcraft. WoW was, and still is, the absolute worst of all.
I start WoW, skip past the intro cinematic and with a second of the login screen showing up, there is a scratchy singular beep and it freezes. The beep comes from the speakers, not the PC, if that makes any difference.

My PC's hardware setup is as follows:

OS: Windows 7 64-bit RC Build 7100
Motherboard: MSI K8N-Neo4 Platinum PCB 1.0
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
RAM: 4GB DDR-400
GPU: Sapphire ATI Radeon HD4850
Sound: Realtek AC97

Along with the OS itself and the games listed above, the only other software installed is MSN, Skype, Steam, Office, Avast! and iTunes.

Now, I've been fighting this problem for a few days now and so I have tried a few things that some people might tell me to do on here, so I'll list what I've done.

1. I have updated all drivers for CPU, GPU, Sound. The Motherboard is a few years old so there aren't any Windows 7 (or even Vista) drivers available for it.
2. I've tried running everything in Safe Mode.
3. I have performed a Memory Diagnostic Test, and it came up clean.
4. A few people have suggested that it could be the beta drivers for the video card causing problems, so I have tried rolling back to 3 previous versions, as well as wiping drivers completely and letting Windows choose which drivers to use.
5. I have tried running as Administrator.
6. I have tried running in Compatibility Modes (everything from WinXP SP2 through Vista SP2)
7. I have tried doing a clean install of WoW from v1.0 to current (for those of you who don't know, that's about a 5-6 hour process)

I have tried all of the above things and nothing seems to make any difference, for better or worse.

I have been trying to keep an eye on WHEN these freezes happen to try and recognise a pattern, but apart from my PC almost CERTAINLY crashing during a game, I see no pattern while on the desktop.

I'm at my wits end with this at the moment and am very very close to reverting back to XP.

Any help/suggestions would be so very greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

I am also investihgating a problem which could well be related.
If I used IE 32Bit, I was totally unable to use any other programs until I closed IE again. Sometimes the whole OS would freeze. My compromise, for the moment, was to use IE 64Bit. Oddly, although this imports all the settings from the 32Bit version, my problem vanished. Should you decide to follow this course, it is necessary to install the 64Bit Java.

I haven't been using IE, I've been using Firefox (obviously 32-bit). I'll uninstall that and give IE64-b a try.

Will post back with my findings.

EDIT: Just tried that. No difference.

Spent the last two days trying to work out why Windows 7 64 bit kept freezing after install on new machine. Fine for first 36 hours, after that kept freezing 20secs after I logged in; it worked in safe mode; rolled back to last system restore; updated drivers; ran compatibility mode; removed all programs.

Finally in desperation I unplugged two of my older external drives, and it worked. No freezing, no hanging, working like a charm (so far).