Random short-duration freezes

Computer Forum General Hardware
1

Recently my computer has started having hickups. Its like everything freezes, except the mouse, for a period that is usually 5-15 seconds or so. Occasionally (more often recently) the period has gone up, even for minutes so I have to reboot via reset-button.

It seems to be completely unpredictable, even here while typing this it can happen. It happens in movies, games, while browsing via firefox, whenever… and its getting more and more frequent.

Today I reinstalled windows vista 32bit and the problem is persisting. At first I thought it was graphics related so I bought a new graphics card, but that doesnt seem to be it (i needed a new one anyway so no big deal there).

Right now I m suspecting the hard-disk, or maybe some bus or something, but to tell the truth I am far from a computer expert and I am at a loss as to what to do other than randomly buy new computer parts, which is a bit overkill.

The oldest part of the computer is 5 years or so old (the dvd drive), the rest is either 18 months, or brand new (graphics and second screen). Oh and I have a standalone soundcard thats also from the previous comp but only about 2.5 years old now.

help, please- somebody!

2

its getting worse.

every time i open a window, every time i press some action, every time i go back forward or whatever while browsing the net, or my hardisk, it freezes for a bit. sometimes a long time.

if its frozen, the hd stops making working-sounds, and nothing but the mouse is responsive, though i cant really do anything with it. Taskmanager doesnt show more than 4% cpu usage and 25% ram usage. Even taskmanager freezes though, and I if something is frozen i cant shut it down, even with “close process tree”.

If i keep queueing actions while something is frozen, eventually it will just never stop the freeze and I m forced to reboot via resetbutton.

this is driving me absolutely insane. If I knew this was just the disk i d run down to a store and buy one tomorrow.

3

Welcome to HWF :slight_smile:

First of all, unplug all external hard disks and all internal CD/DVD drives from the computer/motherboard. If the problem doesn’t go away, you could try to replace the data cable of the disk drive. I’m pretty sure it’s a cable issue somewhere.