Visualise yourself saying that title. That's the best way I can describe what my PC is doing.
About 3 or 4 months ago, my PC started intermittently freezing. Approximately every 15-30 minutes it froze for about 5ish seconds. It just appeared to be 'stuck', nothing at all happening. The mouse pointer stopped, no hard drive / DVD access, and if there was sound playing, it would stick, not sure how to explain it, but it kinda sounded like a faster version of when a CD sticks :-/
After trying disconnecting / reseating various things, it appeared to be the video card that was causing the problem, as there was occasional graphical corruption, and it didn't appear to freeze up when I ran WinXP in VGA mode. I replaced the video card, and this appeared to cure the problem, because it never happened again. Until a few days ago. My PC has been on quite a bit more than usual in the past couple of weeks. Not really doing anything system intensive - just downloading/seeding torrents (all legal before you start ) and general internet THINGS. It freezes whenever it feels like it, and quite often when I'm burning DVDs, which seems to generate a few coasters
My spec is:
Gigabyte 965P-DS3 S775 motherboard
Intel C2D 6300 on stock cooling (never OC'd)
3GB DDR2 RAM (2x512 and 2x1GB Corsair Value Select)
480W Xclio PSU
320GB SATA HDD
160GB IDE HDD
80GB IDE HDD
(all HDDs 7200RPM)
16x SATA DVD-RW
512MB nvidia 9550 video card (passive cooling)
PCI Belkin Wireless adapter
CPU/GPU/Mobo temperatures are absolutely fine.
I'm wondering if my PSU is strong enough. Whilst I hate the peeing-up-against-a-wall competition that seems to go on with PSU manufacturers, I do have an inkling that it may not be enough for all those drives, but saying that, the only item on that spec that's changed in the last 18 months is the video card that was recently replaced, so why go all cacky on me now?
Any (sensible) suggestions welcome!