M17X Random Freezing

Alright, first off let me introduce myself I'm more of an advanced user for PCs.

Second off here are my specs

M17X Laptop
2.83 Ghz CPU Dual Core
4 GIG RAM 1333 MHz
320 GIG HDD (where OS is on) and 500 gig data
4870 GPU
Windows 7 Home Preimum 64 bit (completely legit, it came from Alienware)

Brand new laptop got it for christmas spent nearly $2,500 on it. And the problem comes in mutli-tasking.

The difficult thing about this problem is I've been having a hard time of pin pointing why it's doing what it's doing.

To give you an example I will play Crysis, AC1, all kinds of games for hours and hours.

However if I'm say click on Control Panel to change a setting, or open up firefox it will sometimes quit responding. I would say that it does this 10-20% of the time, and out of those times 50% of the time it requires a reboot either hard or soft.

Control panel seems to really act up the must though.

I installed Anti-virus from day one and never recieved even so much as a warnring of a virus plus I've already re-formated the drive once therefore the OS has been on the PC for less then a month.

One thing of note I did remember last night is when I had all my music on the 320 GIG HDD it would occasionally skip in sound like a buzz noise would come through. I then for storage reasons copied my music files over to my 500 GIG and I recieve no such noise anymore so I have a feeling the 320 GIG HDD is the culprit here.

Any suggestions?

I think the most difficult problem about this issue is that I get no error messages outside of the programs not working, and it doesn't seem to happen all the time nor have I be able to recreate the problem on a constinent basis.

In fact most of the time I'm able to fix most of my PC problems by a simple google, this isn't the case which is why I've joined this forum.

Any additional information you require please let me know.

Any suggestions?

Any help please?

if you know the brand of the HDD, most major manufacturers have free utility to scan your HDD for any faults or errors or failures... do that first to see if your HDD is indeed dying...