I have a Gateway M-6816 Laptop.32 bit Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU T2310 @1.4GHz 1.47GHz Processor, 1GB of RAM.

I have had this laptop for about 5 years but recently it has come across some strange freezing. Randomly when doing anything from browsing on either Firefox or chrome to playing mmos I would hear this extremely odd ticking sound from my laptop and then my screen would freeze. I could not ctrl + alt + delete to get out and it was so frozen even the light for cap locks would not show. My only option would be to force shut down my laptop and attempt to restart. After a while of trying to find the source of this error I began to get the blue screen of death. It eventually got so horrible that I could not even log into my hard drive and was forced to completely wipe it.

At first I began to think it was because I had Windows Vista so I wiped my laptop and replaced it with Windows 7. There have been no issues after I installed Windows 7 after that so I assumed it was fixed. However I began to get the same freezing problem today after I ran a disk check.

So I am asking if anyone knows some way to help me out to stop this?

Ticking is normally an indicator of a failing hard drive.

You need a ton more RAM and a better CPU to run Win7 to it's full advantage.
This setup would be well suited to XP, but no further, sorry..

If I had Windows XP instead would the freezing/hard drive issues stop or should I replace the hard drive as well?

An OS reinstall will not fix a pending hardware failure, but it will allow the cpu to deliver better performance.

You need to source a new drive before this one fails completely.

Guess I should look into buying an external hard drive then. Thank you for the assistance.

You can't run the OS from an external drive.
Seriously have a look on eBay as an internal drive is little outlay and easy to install.
Normally simply a case of removing a couple of screws and going from there.