Hi Terri,
Freezing can have several causes, but the majority are either video drivers
or impending hardware failure, possibly memory or the motherboard itself. I
would start by updating your machine to the most recent XP driver available
for the video card. You might also try disabling McAfee's software for a
time as this antivirus solution has also been known to cause various system
issues.
If that fails, then run full system malware scans from safe mode using up to
date definition files, but antivirus and antispyware. You could also run a
memory diagnostic with something like oca
(
http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp), Docmemory
(
http://www.simmtester.com/) or memtest86 (
http://www.memtest86.com/).
Those Northgates were great machines, I still have a laptop from them that
works great. Too bad they've been out of business for a number of years.
Unfortunately, the machines they made are starting to get a bit long in the
tooth, so there is the potential that you are experiencing hardware failure
as well. Also, to ensure you get the right advice, you should be addressing
this in an XP group as there are some differences in how you approach
reparations between it and Vista (which is where you are posting right now).
--
Best of Luck,
Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
Windows help -
www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts
http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com