Random Freezing

[Krik]

So recently my laptop has been locking up temporarily whenever it uses a lot of resources. The mouse and sound never stop responding but the taskbar and any application running will lock up. It will stay like this until I press CTRL+ALT+Delete, after I press that it'll come up with the normal CTRL+ALT+Delete screen after 5 or 10 seconds. Another thing to note is that it never locks up while it's actually running a program only whenever launching it, for instance ArmA 2(the most demanding game on my laptop) runs without a hitch and doesn't overheat or anything. The hard drive's getting full but I don't think that's the problem as I still have 40 gigs or so free. I opened up my laptop completely not too long ago and got all the dust out, so I doubt it's that.

 

[Kevlar]

Sounds like not enough ram. Try running less applications (type msconfig into run and you can see what is being loaded). If that doesn't solve anything I don't know what else it would be really.

 

[Krik]

I've got 4GB of ram, that should be plenty for just chrome, spotify, skype, and steam.

 

[Splintert]

Hard drive might be taking a long time to load things, especially if its a 5,400 RPM drive.

 

[Krik]

Ah that's possible, why would the problem just pop up now though? I've had this hard drive for 6 or 7 months now.

 

[Splintert]

Fragmentation, perhaps another program is constantly making use of it, uhhh manufacturer death clocks?

 

[Krik]

I've never defragged this hard drive, I'll give that a try.

 

[Lerber]

The drive could be going bad as well. It happened to one of my old drives.

 

[Krik]

Man I sure hope not, I replaced my last one with this one not too long ago.