My computer seems to randomly stall momentarily. I notice when I'll listening to music or playing a game, the audio will cut out, and the screen will freeze for approx. 1 second. Then it will return to normal. This happens every 3 - 5 minutes or so. I've updated my 3d card drivers and I've scanned for viruses and spyware with Ad-Aware and Norton AntiVirus.

Anyone have any other suggestions? I'm trying to avoid reformatting, but I will if it comes to that, cause this is freakin annoying.

Get Malwarebyte's Antimalware and AVG from download.com

Norton and Ad-aware are obsolete and horrible programs. They're at the top of hackers' list for viruses/malwre to bypass.

Sounds to me like an HDD starting to die.

kill norton

Thanks for suggestions so far.

AVG won't install on my computer. I tried to get it already, and the install kept failing (might work if I redownload it, I'm not sure).

MalwareByte's Anti-Malware ran beautifuly. I did a quick scan, and it found 10 items that Norton missed, but sadly I'm still having the issue. I'm gonna do a full scan tonight when I go to bed. (Kind of upset I just spent $40 on Norton. *sigh* live and learn.)

Hard drives are not dying. 1 is brand new, and the other I just ran a test utility from Seagate on before I installed Vista which came back good.

Anything else I should try?

You could also use a program called "superantispyware" I find that works the best.

As for the antivirus, I would reccomend a program called Avira over AVG. Its freeware so every time you update it you'll get a popup window to close out, but it works excellent, has free realtime coverage, and catches most everything the other ones don't.

I wouldnt be too sure about the seagate not dying, 7 times out of 10 their pieces of junk. Had a brand new one for 2 months and it died on me. And if anyone posts a rant about that last comment -- yes, I know how you feel about them, I remember your last posts concerning them when I expressed this opinion, but it hasn't changed and neither have the newegg reviews that validate it.

I've had my seagate drives for 3 years and they are fine.

Always were slow though >.<

do you have any processes running that are eating up 100% of the cpu

Onimusha, I've never had any issues with my Seagate drives, but you're entitled to your opinion, so whatever. But anyway I'm pretty sure the drives are fine. If they aren't I can't do anything about that anyway, so lets move on.

As to the programs you suggested, I'll check them out this afternoon.

Zan, nope processes look ok. I've also done process scans online and nothing's been red-flagged.

Uninstall Norton, reboot, make sure its not running any processes. I swear, Norton used to cause a pause like you describe back in the day when I used it. (3ish years ago)

If this works, I highly recommend calling Norton Technical Services and telling them they are a bunch of quack jobs.

I don't see NewEgg reviews that validate it, and the same could be said about most drives. Seagate, along with WD, are one of the most trusted brands for hard drives out there.

Norton's not causing it. I didn't have it installed when the problem first started.

it's a hardware or driver problem.

Could be a hardware/driver problem like Joncy suggests.

Still I recommend opening Task Manager, Process tab, sort by CPU. When it happens again see if any process in particular jumps to the top with a high % briefly.

if it's a problem with an application it's running in the kernel.

MZZT, tried that. Didn't see anything.

Jon`C. Quite possibly a driver issue. I doubt it's hardware. Could it be sound card related?

[edit: nevermind that. I had an "unknown device" which turned out to be the Midi port / game port device for my mobo. Turns out vista doesn't like it, but I was able to disable it in the BIOS. Problem still exists though, and all other drivers are current.]

It could be related to anything that can preempt the scheduler.

Problem caused by computer hardware

You received this message because hardware or software in your computer caused Windows to shut down unexpectedly and restart. This is a serious problem, commonly referred to as a stop error or blue screen.

Troubleshooting

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


If you have received this error more than once, we recommend that you do the following:

Back up your files to avoid data loss in case of a complete hardware failure.

Contact the original manufacturer of your computer to determine the specific component which is failing.

How do I find my computer manufacturer?

Click the Start button , type msinfo32 in the Search box, and then press ENTER. Your computer manufacturer is listed as the System Manufacturer in the right pane of the System Information window.

Click to go online to see contact information for most computer manufacturers

Additional technical information

Although we know the problem is caused by a hardware component, the error report does not contain enough information to tell us the specific component. It is likely that the problem is being caused by one of the following computer components:

Random Access Memory (RAM)
System board
Central Processing Unit (CPU)
Power supply

(this is what Windows Vista thinks after I got a BSOD)

Yes, like I said it's a problem with your hardware or your drivers. You need to give us more information about your box before we can tell you anything about it.

Open msinfo32.exe

Go file->export

post file here.

I really don't know on this but, Jon'C do you think it might be a power supply issue? I know from past experiences they cause computers to do some pretty strange things when you've got a screwy one. Again, just a speculation, I could be totally off point, thats why I'm asking.

If I had to guess I'd say it's a bad motherboard. My first suspect would be bad capacitors. If it were an issue with just about any other motherboard component the issue probably wouldn't be intermittent.

A RAM problem would manifest itself in other ways unless it's ECC RAM, but if he had ECC RAM he wouldn't need to talk to us for help.

The CPU could be overheating, but the computer would have to be getting very long in the tooth for it not to shut down automatically and give a thermal fault error message the next time it booted up.

There are a few other things. To be honest, though, diagnosing them would require using perfmon.exe with specific settings for a pretty long duration and I don't really feel like giving a tutorial. Blah blah blah, watch for % interrupt time, page faults/sec and cache faults/sec.

Edit: I'd be surprised if it's a power supply issue, but it's worth a look. Check for fluctuations on the +12 V rails.

I'm thinking RAM most likely.
(the system is self-built and that's the oldest components.)

[edit: also, hopefully RAM, cause that will be easy to diagnose and fix. I have 3 ram sticks in the comp right now. They're different sizes and if I recall different speeds too, so that could be an issue. Someone told me it might be once, but I never had trouble with it so I left them how they were. I'll pull them individually and see if the problem goes away.)]

here's system info:
(broken into 3 parts cause of massassi's filesize limit. and yes I named them "frog" that's just how it is.)