My entire system hangs every 3 to 4 minutes

[Guest]

I'm wondering if this has been addressed elsewhere. In nay case, just
upgraded to Vista. Now every 3 or 4 minutes, my entire system just freeezes
for about 30 seconds. I'm afraid I'm not very savvy, but I know this much:

Dell E520, upgraded from XP, running Home Premium, system supports Aero
glass, Radeon 1300 video card, 2 gigs RAM, 110 gigs free ona 140 gig hard
drive, typically low CPU usage (don't run a lot of apps)

I basically just surf the Net. This is very frustrating. Is there a patch
out there somehwere? Is it a driver issue. I'd be happy to post any and all
information about my system if you would find it helpful. Thanks for any and
all input.

 

[R. McCarty]

Upgrade from XP - Did you perform the "Prep" work beforehand ?

Since the "Freeze" happens at a fixed interval, I would download &
run SysInternals Process Explorer. You can start it, log data and at
the freeze point examine the log to find the process that is taking all
the system resources.

Indexing is a controversial aspect of Windows and can sometimes
affect performance until it's data is built. I'm not saying that's your
root cause but it's possible. It's a search feature that few users make
use of or are aware of it's capabilities.

Process Explorer's home page found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/ProcessesAndThreads/ProcessExplorer.mspx