Temporary freeze

[Willo]

Periodically my system freezes and the hard drive
thrashes for a couple minutes before continuing an
operation. This occurs mainly with calls to the system,
e.g., help, fonts, Norton, control panel, etc. While the
disk repeats "tick tick tick buzz," nothing else can be
accessed. It sometimes occurs during an online operation,
such as a search.

This began right after a download of Norton anti-virus
(2000)updates.

I have defragmented the drive, have a lot of available
memory.

Can someone tell me where to look for the problem?

 

[Guest]

From the sounds of it your hard drive may be going bad.
The tick tick buzz thing is the heads moving to a bad
sector and re-seeking itself again to the bad sector.
I'd recommend doing a full chkdsk/scandisk with the "scan
the hard drive for bad sectors" turned ON.

 

[Ted Zieglar]

Well, seeing as NAV 2000 is not compatible with Windows XP, I'd say you
could have a virus. Or spyware. Or both.

 

[Guest]

I have a similar problem...

I have Windows XP on my Dell XPS T500 with three hard disk drives of
multiple GB temporarialy freezes (locks up, halts, pauses, hangs, etc.) for
several seconds at intervals of about 3 to 5 minutes.
It seems to happen less just after defragging all drives and clearing
temporary files and rebooting.
I have found the following by going to: Control Panel > Performance and
Maintenance > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer > System
I see an error pointing to SOURCE = "atapi" and CATEGORY= "None" and ERROR
="15." There are a great many of these at the times that the PC temporarily
freezes.
I double click on the error entry to see that the error description is: "The
device, \Device\Ide\IdePort1, is not ready for access yet."

So this seems to be the problem.

Can onyone tell me the solution to this problem and make this machine
continue to run -- instead of STOPPING?

It is making me crazy.
(BTW - I am adding to this thread to avoid starting a new one on this
subject.)