Hate to sound like an ad. But, Wal-Mart currently has these Acer Aspires selling for a great price of under $300. Been using one for a few years, now. It's battle worn from heavy usage and just keeps ticking. Maybe not the most powerful PC in the world. But, it's no slouch, neither.

As for what's going on with your machine...probably the virus...virii...causing you problems. Could also be a power supply in failure. As those things heat up, they start to put out variable amounts of voltage. Sensitive chips don't like undervolts and will crash in ways that you are explaining.

Your primary issue is because you're using IE to browse the web. It's an integrated program in Windows, and is horrid for resource usage on PCs. You may find it operates better if you use Firefox, Opera, or Chrome instead.

Also, you may have a number of unnecessary things running in the background of which you're unaware. You can disable these by going to Start -> Run -> type in msconfig -> click Ok -> Startup tab at the top -> Disable All button at the bottom -> click ok -> restart the PC. This will disable any/all programs that load/execute on startup on the PC, save for those required for Windows to work. So, it will also not load any programs on startup, which will considerably free-up resources on the PC. If you find it works alot better with these programs disabled, then you'll know for sure that one of the other programs you normally have running is the cause of your troubles, and you can go through the list on the Startup tab through msconfig, and enable each again one-by-one, until you notice the issue happening again; that way, you can identify what's causing the problem.

When you're done browsing the internet, make sure you close all available browser windows individually before you shut down; if the browser was closed suddenly (for whatever reason), when you relaunch it, it will try to open all the windows you originally had open again, to basically restore your last session. This is the likely reason why you're seeing so many IE windows opening at times. Other causes could be adware on the system, or your mouse is inputting extra clicks when you click on the IE icon, causing it to open multiple windows (this is very common with optical mice, if used on a semi-shiny surface, or if there's dust/hairs/dirt on or near the lens).

Lastly, current releases of software, particularily social media and IM programs (like YIM), and internet browsers (especially IE), are primarily designed to be run on modern, current systems, which by default have considerably more resources and memory available for usage for all the shiny new features they like to integrate into these programs, as opposed to the earlier versions of them, which were made for less memory-intensive operating systems and computers. If your PC is somewhat outdated (2+yrs), you may want to consider a RAM upgrade, if your motherboard can handle more. Also, a mutli-core processor will considerably help when running multiple forms of media at once, like video, IM, and browsing; if your PC is capable of running one of these, it may also be an option to help your situation.

Hope this helps somewhat; it's very hard to offer advice or suggestions without seeing the PC physically, and knowing -alot- more about it, but hopefully these basic suggestions will help out somewhat in your case *hugs* Take care, Warlock :3

yeah one thing is you really shouldnt be using IE as an internet browser... it takes like ten minutes to load any pages on it on my computer, and then it crashes.

you'd do much better with firefox or google chrome. they dont take nearly as long or crash nearly as often.