I don't remember my PC doing this when I first got it home, which was only a few months ago. Sometimes it just freezes up, and goes to a yellow screen. Sometimes it freezes and doesn't go yellow, but changes to something that looks like an overlay issue. I've also had it go to a black screen with some messages about a "device driver stuck in an infinite loop" or something about a crash dump. I didn't get many search results about those here and google was just a mess. I don't have many programs on it yet, and I haven't made any big changes to the system. I've also look at some drivers to try and update them through the device manager. Here's my specs.
E8500, ATI Radeon 4870, MSI P7N SLI Mobo, Hitachi 7200 RPM 500 GB HD, OCZ 4x 2GB DDR2 PC8500, Vista Home Premium 64 bit