Freezing (then beep noise)

I feel this may be a problem most keep secret since it rarely happens. So far it has happened to me twice over the past month. What basically happens is this:

I have a few tabs open in Chrome , maybe WMP open as well playing music. I open a new link in Chrome and then mouse interaction stops. I can move the cursor but I can't click any thing. To my memory, control alt delete may have worked for one or both times this happened. I would then see the mouse cursor become COMPLETELY unusable and unmovable, and that would last for a few seconds, resulting in a loud motherboard sourced beep (although both times I had headphones on. It seemed it could have been a sound from Windows or from the built in beep speaker) and then bam, every thing would go back to normal, every with thing working.

I am not sure how this happens. The 3610QM handles browsing like cake. With 7 tabs open in Chrome, two of which are youtube videos and one actually playing, and WMP playing a song in the background, CPU usage is a measly 4%. Yes, with all of that running!. I have 16GB 1600Mhz RAM, and usage rarely goes over 3.5GB, if ever. Cpu temps have always been normal (low to mid 50s when doing non-gaming stuff), no errors in memtest86, no HDD errors. How the hell does this happen with this kind of power? Could a plugin slow down actually cause a 100% usage spike, locking up the I/O?

I have seen this happen many times in Mac's, even the powerful, modern ones, but I thought it was just a Mac thing. It would happen in my Windows HP desktop as well, but I assumed it was inevitable hardware failure as it was 4 years old. Are these occurrences just expected to happen?