Win XP periodically "Stalls"

Hi All, I am new to this forum and really hope someone can help with my problem. I have a Dell machine running Dual AMD processors and WinXP Pro. Periodically, my machine will sort of "stall ". By this I mean that I am not able to access the start menu, when I hit ctrl-alt-delete for task manager, it will not come up, and if I try to start new programs they will not run. The active programs and windows seem to run fine while this is all going on. After a lengthy time (maybe 5 mins or so), the entire machine comes back to life and all the programs, windows, task manager, etc will start popping up. This happens frequently enough to be annoyed/concerned, but it doesn't affect data or overall operation of the computer. I have been vigilant with keeping background tasks to a minimum and making sure things are set up okay. When the machine is not doing this, it runs speedy and rather well. At first, I thought that this might be due to the AMD chip, since it's the first I have owned, but I am not sure.

I was wondering if anyone has experienced this and can help me get rid of the annoying problem. The computer seems to time out on something and then allows full access again. With this in mind, I was wondering if anyone can tell me where I can change the setting for the timeout so that it refreshes more quickly than it does currently. I would appreciate any help with regard to this.
Regards,
Rich

 

Hi and welcome to the BBS,

Watch the HDD activity LED. If it is running during the pause I would suspect a security scanning program is holding things up. You can test by disconnecting from the internet and disable the antivirus, antispyware or security suite (firewall? possibly).

If you have not updated your drivers, go to the Dell Support website, find out how to identify your Service Tag and get the latest drivers, starting with the chipset drivers.

As I said, if it seems to happen when programs (or files) are accessed, I would suspect a security program.

Matt