PC semi-locking up. Have to reboot very often. Any ideas?
 

For the past few weeks after a while, anywhere from 5 mins to 20 mins, of activity such as opening Firefox, Thunderbird, WMP, or other normal pc things I can no longer open another program. I can close out the current programs I'm using or continue using them but if I try to open or run something else it pauses like it is going to then I get the hour glass then nothing. If I Ctrl-Alt-Del it does the same thing but just displays the icon in the system tray and never pops up so I can not end any tasks.
I have tried formatting and reinstalling windows. I run AVG, Spybot, AdAware, HiJack This. No problems to be found. Could this be a hardware issue? I am all out of ideas, any suggestions?

When was the last time you ran a full defrag on all partitions/hard drives? It's possible some hardware is going haywire, too. Newer computers are cheaper than ever, that also means cheapers parts. If you have an air compressor take it out and have it dusted.

Been a little while on the defrag will try that this evening. Thanks.

Can you tell us more about your system? What type of CPU, speed, motherboard, installed RAM, hard disk, etc.

You're using Firefox, so the usual suspect (spyware), I'll assume you've already checked. That said, this sounds a lot like some kind of virus. When is the last time you did a scan?

Sounds like a shit sandwich to me. I'd start the "replace every hardware component in the system one by one" phase right about now. Sounds like your RAM or CPU to me.

-Lasereth

If you say you can use your computer for awhile, load a whack of programs (all of which take up inordinate amounts of RAM to begin with) and after it awhile your PC hangs/locks up/exhibits strange behaviour, it definitely seems like a RAM problem.

Run memtest86.

AMD Barton 2500
Asus A7V8X-X
2x512 Kingston PC 2100
Geforce4 Ti4200
SBLive! 5.1
6x WD 120G SE


Ran defrag this evening while I was at work. Looked like it was longer than I thought since I did it, or maybe the mass amount of file transfer between drives lately but half the bar was red when I Analyzed the main drive heh.
So far this evening it has not locked up and I have been opening and closing Firefox, Thunderbird, ICQ, World of Warcraft etc. so apparently either that was it or a main contributer to the problem.
System scans virus free and there is only one piece of spyware that i cannot completely remove. "p6.exe" reappears on reboot after removal with the tools mentioned in the first post. It auto-opens Firefox to a search page on startup most of the time in pairs.

It's back to doing the same thing again so defrag wasn't the answer, though it was needed. Will try taking out the RAM seperately later today and see if that works.