Annoying freezes

So I recently assembled my new pc. I watched and read lots of tutorials, followed guides word to word and the system booted on the first time. Everything was GREAT until I got my Intel SSD a week later... I installed a fresh copy of win7 64-bit on the SSD, formatted the hard drive I was using before and assigned it to a special folder to keep my movies/games/music.

And then the freezes started. It's unlike any kind of freezing up I've ever seen. I can NEVER recover from them. If I'm doing something CPU-demanding, installing a game/copying lots of files/etc, that specific application just freezes up and whatever program I try to use afterward freezes up too! This is my first time using win7 and it's not turning out to be an enjoyable experience... I remember on XP if some program froze, I would just alt-tab to another one and continue my work until the lag is gone, and that on a low-budget system too. But when I get these lags, EVERYTHING stops working. For the first few times, I thought it was just your everyday windows fail, but this keeps on happening and starting to be annoying because I can't save anything and the only option I have to get around these freezes is to push the reset button.

I haven't tested my system yet for stability (installed the SSD yesterday) but planning on running memtest86+ over the night and super-pi maybe and see if it shows anything (although I have a feeling it's not gonna show anything). So far I've only installed basic programs (nod32, MS office, itunes, spybot, daemon tools, msn, hardware drivers...) and the system is up-to-date.

I strongly believe that these lags are somehow related to the SSD installation because I haven't had this kind of lag when I had my OS on the hard drive and these freezes often occur when I install things in the folder I assigned the HD to. But they also happen on random occasions, like when I try to open a program from the taskbar...

Here are my components:
i5 CPU
XFX 5850 GPU
Intel X-25M Postville 80gb SSD
2x2gb g.skill gbrh ddr3-1333 (changed the timings to 7-7-7-21 in bios as instructed) RAM
WD caviar black 640gb HD
MSI P55-GD80 MOBO
Samsung sh-s223b DVD writer
Antec cp-850 PSU
Antec p183 CASE
Win7 ultimate 64-bit OS

As you can see this rig SHOULD be able to run most demanding applications, although I have only worked with XP in the past so I don't know how much the OS affects this. I already played CoD: MW2 on this and it was flawless so I have a hard time believing that my system is just too "weak" for my purposes... and so I turn to you guys. I think this is all the info I can provide, let me know if you need more.