Well, I've been running Linux for a few months now, I finally am sticking with it.

I like it a lot, but the problem is, it locks up semi-often. If I use my computer for an hour, it'll probably happen two or three times.

It will completely freeze for 10-20 seconds.

Everything stops. If I'm watching a movie, it will continue from the spot where it froze up like nothing happened.

It's pretty frustrating at times.

Nothing crashes, nothing is lost. It will just freeze for a while.
Which if I'm in the middle of typing or doing something is really annoying.

Anyone know what might cause this?

It never did this when I had windows running on it. And actually to think of it, the times I've tried using Unbuntu before, it never happened either. It's only happened when I've been using this latest release.

Spinning up/down a drive?

I don't know for certain... but I am pretty sure the penguin king is behind it...

He wants you to get off islands, those are his turf.

Damn him! He's always causing trouble with us.

Install htop and have it running in a visible console with it sorted by CPU so that you can try to spot what is causing it.

If everything being displayed by the Xserver is "frozen", you probably will not see htop's output when it matters most since it will be frozen as well.

This sounds to me like a hardware problem. Perhaps it's just coincidence that it started happening with the new release.
Do you still have a Windows partition? I would try to work with Windows for a few days to see if the problem occurs there as well.

I'd honestly recommend mint over ubuntu. if ubuntu = xp, mint = 7. It works fine for me when I need to leave my computer on for days at a time. Granted, about all I have running is irssi, but still.

I've been pissed at Ubuntu for a while. Its sound system is awful; for some reason every release introduces new problems for my sound card that I have to hack around. At first I thought it was my onboard sound so I replaced it with a real sound card. Didn't help. I haven't experienced any crashes or freezes like you're talking about in normal usage, but I was using the live cd last week to recover some files from my brother in law's virus-infected windows box and the live cd thing froze up a bunch of times. I ended up using the vanilla debian live cd instead and it worked fine. There are definitely issues with Ubuntu; I think they rush their releases and don't spend enough time on hardware compatibility and testing.

Pulse Audio is the worst thing ever. In fact, ALL Linux sound is a horrible mess written by extremely incompetent people. I think OSS4 might be the only thing worth trying anymore.

FreeBSD's sound system (which is based on OSS) has always worked wonderfully for me. I never have to deal with the horrors of Pulse Audio and ALSA (though to be fair, it seems to usually work in Ubuntu).

why did ubuntu move the window controls to the left side of the window

that's like the ONE THING I can't shake my habit for and therefore frustrates me in OSX

Supposedly the right side of the window titlebar will contain widgets or something in the next release.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Move-Window-Controls-back-to-right-in-Ubuntu-1004

In the meantime, you can just pick a different theme and they'll go back to the right side (double meaning intended).

Thanks for the Mint suggestion!

Everything is all and well now, and I like the layout of the menu much better.

Yea, odd, guess it was just something in the latest Ubuntu release that didn't agree with my computer.