Computer freezes every 7 seconds and is fine again.

[yoyo13131]

Ya my computers freezes every once in a while. Like when im downloading stuff and web bowsing my computer freezes for about 7 second and then is fine for about 4 second and it keeps repeating this over and over again. Its priddy time consuming when you want to wait 5 minutes just to shut off your computer. Does anyone know what might be casuing this? or a way to fix it?

-Brian

[Daniel]

Hey yoyo13131, welcome the PC Support Forum.

Can you give us some specs about your machine, for example how much RAM do you have?

Try these steps here, may help you speed up your PC and reduce crashing:

- Scan with Ad-Aware; Scan with Spybot Search & Destroy and fix if any problems. Download Spyware Guard, so you will have more protection from spyware. If you have other software, do a scan with them.

- Second is scan for viruses, it is important to check for viruses frequently, remember to download the latest viruse definitions.

- Fix your registry from errors, use PC Bug Doctor, or TuneUp Utilities, WinASO Registry Optimizer. Registry errors can help your system to crash much more, so run these, some of them you have to download a trial version, but are worth it.

- Clear you temporary files and your browser/s cache.

Then post your results here

[yoyo13131]

Ya here are my system specs

- 1.14GHz AMD Athlon Thunderbird
- EPoX EP-8KTA3+ motherboard (VIA KT-133a)
- 512MB of PC-133 SDRAM
- Leadtek GeForce4 Ti4200 (4x AGP/64MB onboard DDR) w/nVidia FW 61.77
- 80GB 7200RPM Maxtor HDD
- Netgear 10/100 PCI Ethernet card
- Windows XP Professional w/SP1

And I allways use spy bot and adaware and bazooka. I sometimes run norton.

[Alan]

Check that all your fans are working and clean. If your PC needs a bit of a spring clean (or winter clean) have a look at one of my posts in the 'How To' section, it will help you a little. If that does not cure the problem, have a look at the running processes and see what is eating your resources (press alt ctrl and del) take a screenshot of the runnining processes and post it here so we can look at it for you.

[yoyo13131]

Here are the images of my running processes when I frist start up my computer. Oh and I got brand new fans and I replaced my video card fan with a VGA heatpipe coller so thats not the issue.

[Alan]

If its not heat related then the next thing I would look at is your memory sticks, have you added extra RAM?
Try removing them one at a time to see if one of the sticks has gone bad.

[Daniel]

Welcome back Alan

[Alan]

Thanks Daniel, I am home for one week, then back to Norway. Should have my laptop by then.

[Daniel]

Ahhh... that's better

[yoyo13131]

Ok, ill do several memory tests to see if there bad.

[yoyo13131]

Ya, I ran mem test 9 times (it took 6 hours) and it found nothing wrong with my ram

[Alan]

Click on this link and run an online diagnostics test.

[yoyo13131]

Ya I did the tests and there was a Red flag in hard drive because my 80Gig is allmost full and a Yellow flag in Internet because my cache was too large and it said to put it to 5 or 80 and mine is at 2552. and my overall score was 763. And while it was testing it said it found a trojan. ill run norton.

[yoyo13131]

I ran norton and it didnt find anything... i guess that could be a bad thing or a good thing, becuase I want to fix my "7 second freeze" for good.

[Alan]

Personally speaking, I dont rate Norton at all but thats just my opinion. If you tell usthe name of the trojan we will help you remove it. If you dont have spywareblaster, download it and run, it will not remove any malware but it will help to protect your pc from intrusive software.

To adjust cache properties, follow these directions:

Open Internet Explorer
Go to Tools then select Internet Options.
In Internet Options select the General tab.
In the middle of the General tab is the Temporary Internet files section. Click the Settings button.
On the pop-up window that appears, checkmark "Every visit to the page" under "Check for newer versions of stored pages." This will insure updated web pages always get displayed in your browser.
Next, in the "Temporary Internet files folder" field under "Amount of disk space to use," set the MB to an ideal number based on the amount of hard drive space available. If you have a small hard drive, you'll probably want to make it about 10MB or less. (The smaller the number, the faster the cache will overwrite itself as you visit web pages.)
When you're finished making changes, select "OK."
Then select "OK" in the Internet Options dialog box.