Computer freeze due to torrent?

3 months back when I was using my old PC, my computer would force me to restart my computer whenever I run my Azureus for a few hours. There will be this small windows which gave me 60 seconds of countdown to shutting down.

A month ago after I bought a new system, I installed uTorrent instead of Azureus. Initially there was no problem at all until about a week ago my computer will just freeze partially.

uTorrent will stop responsding and I have to stop it forcefully.

All other programs will also stop working.

Windows will not even let me open up a simple txt file.

No audios or videos will play.

Avast is still running.

ZoneAlarm stop responding and can't be invoked.

To make the matters worse, I cant even restart/shutdown my computer the normal way. I have to hard reset it to restart my system.

I am running Windows XP SP 2.

System config:

Intel DuoCore 2 1.8 GHz

2 GB RAM

550W PSU

I am very positive it is not due to my hardware. Anyone has any idea?

Computer freeze due to torrent?free antivirus download

The whole point of torrents is that you are sharing files with other computers, it works both ways. You obtain them from someone else's computer and in return they get files from yours.

By running the torrent you give up control of your PC. If lots of people want a fragment of a file that's on your computer it will run slower.