Windows XP Lock Up

At home i run Windows XP Home Edition and have found that with certain
software the operating system locks up completely, also when using
search loOking for temp files to delete it is very slow, when it does
lock up and i use ctrl, alt del to reboot, all i get is a window that
opens telling me what software is running and the system doesn’t reboot,
it locks so much that i have to turn my pc off at the wall socket and
then i have to wait for it to reset before using it again, is there
anything that i can do to stop this, or is this just abnother fault with
Microsoft operating systems, my pc is only about 3 months old and is a
packard bell 1.3ghertz processor with 512meg RAM.