Computer lags for ~5 seconds - hard faults?

[transcend11]

I've got an annoying problem that just began yesterday. I'll get about a 5 second lag that will make the music stutter, mouse non-responsive and skipping across the screen. This will occur randomly while my computer is under no apparent distress. I can be browsing the internet, Pandora playing music in the background, typing outlines for school... and it will happen every 15-30 minutes.

I monitored this with the Resource Monitor in Windows 7 and saw some clues that may help. Here's a screenshot, maybe you've got some ideas.

I haven't had any change in my system recently, neither hardware nor software.

My system:
Radeon HD 4850 512MB
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Manchester 2.2GHz Socket 939
OCZ Platinum 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)
DFI LANPARTY UT nF4 Ultra-D 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard

 

[xxEIEIOxx]

Usually when I see something like this it is the search indexer or antivirus. It might be neither but those are the first things I would look at.

 

[Sovereign]

Run this too: http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

If there are a lot of spikes, it suggests a misbehaving (or corrupt) driver. I know you mentioned not having any changes, but sometimes Windows will install driver updates that don't restart your machine.

 

[Met-AL]

I have had these symptoms when I had a single hard disk in the middle of failing in my system. Removed the bad drive and the symptoms went away.

 

[Vashypooh]

Happened a lot to me with an external HD plugged in.

 

[koolaidkitten]

I had this problem, it was a loose sata cable.

 

[nailzer]

I had the same problem with shuddering and periods of no activity within programs. It turned out to be bad memory. Three of four Crucial Ballistix RAM modules were bad.

 

[Skirrow]

I had a similar problem too. Mine was because i had windows set to turn off hard drives when they were not in use. The problem was when it came to spooling them up again it would cause the system to thrash like crazy. Was really annoying when watching a movie and the film would hang for a few seconds. Took me ages to work out what the problem was. Set my power profile to never turn the hard drives off and the problem went away.

Also are you using Diskeeper at all? i use it and it can cause spikes in hard drive usage and combined with revving up powered down hard drives can cause hangs.