Leosghost - 11:49 pm on Apr 6, 2011 (gmt 0)

The machine I'm typing this on has 4 gigs of RAM and is running mint and win7 ulti in a dual boot ..the win7 was installed first as it would have done what all winstalls do and trashed the linux ..I used a live CD to install mint ..took less than 10 minutes including the time spent in repartitioning the HD ..didn't freeze once.

I think you may have flaky RAM there ..RAM gets pushed more in an install than it does running an OS ( unless you do a lot of 3D renders in windows using Maya or Blender etc ..or a lot of transcoding ) your RAM could be fine running win ( whatever it is ) but sometime seem a little slow ..that might be all you notice if your RAM isn't well ..until one day the box won't boot in to win or whatever it is installed with .

I'd run a memory test ( memtest if you are on win )on it before trying to install anything by way of another OS ..just in case ..leave it run over night ..see what it found in the morning ..