Bios and O/S lockups

[Kurjack]

About last week or so my computer started to suffer from lockups while browsing in windows. The explorer would crash and sit attempting to recover and then everything would freeze except for the mouse. This would happen about 2-3 minutes after booting up. Did a little bit of messing around and figured maybe I have some kind of brutal virus, so I attempted to reload my windows 7 and was not able to do this onto my current SSD.

Replaced my SSD with a Intel 520 series 120 GB SSD and was able to load windows on to it fine. I didn't think much of it at the time but a few times while on the boot selection screen I would not be able to change or move or select the boot option I wanted until I restarted and tried again. Ive also since installing the new windows had explorer crash again as well as having windows update freeze on updating step 1 of 93.

I'm thinking I may either have a Motherboard or RAM issue, what is the most likely culprit I should focus my attention on next?

I did recently change my ram to go to 12GB of ram but I did run the ram through 5 or so passes of memtest86+ and the computer functioned fine for 3 weeks since changing the ram.

[Rasparthe]

Almost guaranteed its a RAM issue, or possibly a RAM conflict with your motherboard although it would be odd to run so long just fine and then have a problem so I would lean towards RAM. Have you run Memtest 86+ again since? Also when you ran the Memtest did you do it with all 12GB installed or individually/pairs? I'm assuming of course you haven't overclocked either the RAM or the processor as that would be another likely culprit.

[Kurjack]

I had all 12 GB installed and ran the tests. Was able to watch movies and play games last night just fine. Ill setup another memtest on my ram tomorrow morning so it runs while im at work. Should I be doing each stick individually?