Asus K50ID refuses to work with other browsers.

Here's an interesting thing. For the past two years i had this problem with my Asus K50ID. It randomly froze when on a Chrome/Firefox/Opera browser or once during me watching a good movie( bad timing ) 2-3 months after a fresh windows 7 installation. I'd usually try a forced restart, which would wipe out my entire system partition which in turn lead to me reinstalling Windows. Now it seems to skip the "wipe-out the system drive" part and opens normally. It works fine(games, videos, editing software) until.... I open a Chrome/Firefox/Opera browser when all hell breaks loose. It's like the processor suddenly decided to go to the 1990's. It freezes and doesn't respond to any commands whatsoever and even if it does it works really, really slow (a shutdown took 4 hours for reference). Interestingly, it works fine with Internet Explorer. Any ideas as to what might cause this? I haven't really found a solution anywhere. And no it's not the antivirus software.

Thanks!