Laptop Randomly Freezing.

[primus_fan2001]

Hey, this problem has been occurring for awhile, but has been even more bothersome as of late (seeing as I got back into online gaming). Anyways, my laptop will randomly freeze up for a few seconds (usually no more than 10 seconds) at random times, no matter what it is I'm doing (whether it be gaming, internet, or simply typing homework). Whenever it happens though, it'll freeze for several seconds, and then I'll hear what sounds like a "loading" (best word I can describe it with) sound coming from inside laptop, only to have everything go back to normal. Any ideas as to what the problem is? My specs are below:

Microsoft Windows XP Pro
Intel T2500 (2.0 GHz)
2 GB RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon X1600
100 GB Hard Drive

[redwudz]

Leave your Task Manager running and watch the CPU and memory usage. Also what processes are running. I would suspect a antivirus scan. Do you have something like Norton System Works? That sounds like too new a machine to have overheat problems.

[Bjs]

Laptop brand and model ?

Forget most utilities, esspecially anything related to nortons.

Get hijackthis, do a scan, save log, post log if you would like it to be checked for issues.
If you want a good set of tools, I suggest avgfree, and include spybot s&d.

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From what you describe it sounds more like the hard drive performing the park/wake power management. I would suggest you go into control panel, power management, and disable hard drive power management, and see how it operates from this point for a while.

There is also HD Workbench from http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/download.htm which has been given away for free, on the page, up to the left is user name and serial you need in order to install it.

This tool can show you smart monitoring, and many other features, very handy.

If you need any more help, do pm me.

[Krispy Kritter]

You can also check the event viewer, if something is wrong, it will be logging errors.

From your description it sounds like the HDD is having issues. It is either spinning down (covered by Bjs above) or is failing. If it is failing, windows will be logging errors in the event viewer.