Random Computer crashing post Wireless installation
 

Ok, I'm not quite sure what the source of the problem is. My father decided to buy the D-Link DI-524 Wireless modem today and it came with a USB wireless device which I use on my computer. It was working fine all afternoon but tonight I've suddenly been experiencing random computer freezing. Windows XP PRO SP2 becomes completely unresponsive and I am forced to do a hard reset. At the time I had also disable the integrated sound on my motherboard via BIOS.

The freezing seems to occur at random. I disabled uTorrent from loading with Windows as I thought that was initially the problem. Windows has frozen on me with no programs being opened other than the default start up ones, with Word open, with Firefox open and with a combination of the above programs open.

I tried re-enabling the motherboard sound, but it had no effect on the freezing. I also tried to uninstall and then install the drivers for the wireless device again. I still experienced freezing after that. The freezing occurs at random times. A few times the computer has frozen almost immediately upon being rebooted, and another time it took about an hour before it froze.

Any ideas as to what else I could try to solve this mysterious problem? My family would really like to get rid of that ugly ethernet cable going around the house.

Thanks.

EDIT:

Just thought I'd mention that I'm currently running spyware removal and a virus scan. The virus scan seems to have picked up a few viruses, so I'm going to remove them and see what happens. Still though, I'd appreciate some advice from the more tech savy.

Additional Spam:
Removing the virus did nothing. The computer just froze on me again. Fuck, this is annoying.

Nobody has any ideas?

Is the system stable without the USB device plugged in?

stable = prime95 stable + burncpu stable + no errors in memtes86 on a 24h run

I have no idea what you just wrote.

Liquid Acid is suggesting that you run a bunch of special hardware tests to make sure that your computer is stable.

http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm
http://pages.sbcglobal.net/redelm/
http://www.memtest86.com/

I don't really think that this torture gauntlet is entirely necessary, and can even be risky if your computer really DOES have certain problems.

Some things to check, for starters(this is a long shot... >_> ):
-Go into the BIOS at a cool bootup (you shut the computer down, and its been inactive for 30 or so minutes) and check the processor temperature.
-Go into the BIOS immediately following a freeze-invoked hard reset and check the processor temp

Does your computer keep freezing up even without the USB wireless device?
Also, computer specs might be good.

It's risky to use your computer even if it has stability problems. Stress testing is the smart way to go if you want to have a reliable system. I can't afford working this a system with stability issues, which can probably corrupt the filesystems on my HD.

Won't work - CPU core temperature changes incredibly fast when under load / no under load. Even if the heat transfer CPU-heatsink is not the best.
Better fire up some monitoring software that does synchonized writing to HD, then check the log after next lockup.

I've looked for a free program like that (mind you, not an in-depth internet trawl), but I couldn't find anything that could do the job. What do you know of that could do this?

I use a combination of lmsensors and syslog-ng (removing write cache from the fs the log is written to). I don't know if there are methods to do this under win.

Anything on the Event Log? (START -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer)