Not sure what is causing this problem

Hello everyone. This is my first post here on the forums. While I looked around on here to see if I could find my issue, I didn't have much luck. Perhaps someone here could point me in the right direction.

About a week ago my computer started acting funny, by funny I mean **** me off haha. I would be doing something on my comp when all of the sudden everything would freeze. Actually, not everything, because I could still move my mouse around. It was as if what I was doing just turned into a picture and I could not click on anything or do anything. No clicking the start button, no ctrl alt delete, no right clicks, nothing. I would have to power off the computer by holding down the power key.

At first doing a hard reset of the system seemed to fix the problem, then it got worse. It was doing it more and more frequently. I talked to a friend and he said it sounded like the HDD was dying. I went to the store and bought a new drive (Seaqgate Baracuda 1TB 7200 RPM, SATA). I dropped that in my machine, reinstalled Win 7 Pro, and started running updates. It is then that the issue started again. (sadface)

What could possibly be causing this problem? My case gives me temp read outs from inside and the temps are all in the normal range it seems.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.