"Even just right clicking to get a pop up menu often causes a 10-15 second wait"
That's the context handlers. It's not unusual for me to discover something there. But let's hear more about you. Are you a Windows aficionado? Would you know what tools to use?
Bob
My Laptop is having some issues. In pretty good shape, but for 5 months now it has an intermittent pausing problem.
In happens 30-40 times in an 8 hour day. (4-5 times a hour)
Symptom: The system stops working for between 10 and 25 seconds. When it pauses like this - the mouse usually is movable (though not always) - the CPU is near zero - the hard drive light goes nearly steady on - and everything basically stops. Then after it's done whatever it was doing, it all resumes normal. If during the pause I click on something more than once, it will put (Not Responding) in the title bar of that app or window.
The pause problem typically happens when I'm switching between windows, but it also happens just as often within an application. Even just right clicking to get a pop up menu often causes a 10-15 second wait. The pause can happen when I'm scrolling down a web page (and often the mouse freezes then too). It doesn't seem to matter if I have one application open or 5. It's especially bad with Outlook - is happens a lot when accessing PST folders within Outlook, moving around in Outlook, opening emails, etc. But if I'm typing within an application like Outlook or Word and just type - the problem doesn't happen. So it's mostly connected to me doing something - like moving around, opening things, right clicking, switching windows.
Dell D630 Latitude laptop
Windowx XP SP3
4GB ram
500GB drive WD5000BPKX SATA III 7200 RPM 16 MB Cache
Drive is partitioned:
C: winwows XP. 70GB Free 25GB
D: my docs and data 380GB Free 120GB
E: page file 8G. PF size managed by windows
High speed FioS internet (problem happens both wired or wireless)
All windows and Dell drivers are up to date per websites
All XP updates loaded
Cleaned out dust and fan, everything runs cool
System is malware clean (as far as I know) AVG 2013 up to date and scanned none found/no rootkits
Also ran ESET online scan overnight and found nothing
Drive is defrag (doesn't seem to make a difference)
No failied hardware in hdwr manager
Ran Memtest overnight for 8 hours - no errors
No special hardware attached.
It's maddening. I'll dig into anything to try to solve this if anyone has some ideas.

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