10 second freezes

This started happening about a week ago, my computer will be fine for a few hours or even all day, then it will just start freezing for about 9-10 seconds. After the freeze everything is normal for about 5 minutes, then it repeats. During this, if I do anything with Explorer, Explorer crashes. It just goes solid white and says "not responding". If I try to restart it hangs during the "shutting down" phase and I have to hit the reset button my my PC case.

I have tried closing all programs, removing unnecessary items from Startup, running multiple virus and malware scans, defragmenting several times. Nothing seems to stop this from happening. I have also looked at the Task Manager information during the freezes. I don't see any spikes in memory or CPU usage. I have also run Core Temp and don't see anything abnormal with the CPU temperature. Just now I thought I'd do a system restore, but for some reason my only restore point listed is from yesterday.

Anyone have any ideas?

My specs: 2.4GHZ 64bit Quad Core, 6GB RAM, Vista Ultimate x64, GeForce 8800 GTS

Hi Phil, which antivirus are you using?

I'm using AVG Free 9

Alright then as a test, uninsall AVG, install CCleaner - Home and after uninstalling AVG, run ccleaner and its registry cleaner to delete all junk from your PC.

Oh yes I forgot to mention I had run CCleaner, but have not done it with AVG uninstalled. I'll try that, thanks.

No problem. Anti virus software could be a main cause of system freeze. Also, make sure that your windows is updated.

Yeah I try to take care of Windows Update whenever it pops up.

Let us know if uninstalling AVG does some magic.
If the problem still persist, click Start>Search>Msconfig and press enter.

Now click the Startup Tab, click Disable All.


Now Click the Services tab, check Hide All MS services, and click Disable All. Apply an OK.


Restart the PC.

OK I just uninstalled AVG restarted, ran CCleaner, and restarted again. I'll have to wait to see if it does anything. I guess the idea with your last post is to see if that works, if it does gradually re-enable each item one at a time. Hopefully it won't come to that, it could take a long time since it could take up to a day to see if it worked each time.

Exactly. Let us know if it works or you still have this problem. Well be glad to help you.

OK well it just froze again after uninstalling AVG. So I disabled all of the startup items and services. Well see...

If anyone's curious I think I've got it narrowed down to Wuala and Mozy. Mozy sounds like the more likely culprit. I never use it anyway so I just uninstalled it.

Glad to hear that you got it sorted.

Actually it did it one more time, so Mozy is safe. Now I suspect Norton Ghost. Disabled that and everything seems good now.

I'd recommend you to do a clean install.

Well if it's working, why bother? I'll be re-installing when I buy 7 anyway.