Upgrades end in erratic, partial hangs

By Fred Langa A reader’s heavily upgraded XP system randomly freezes for several seconds from time to time. Strangely, during these mini-hangs, other parts of the system remain unaffected.

Power settings unexpectedly affect performance

Ian has been slowly upgrading his PC, but the last change caused a problem that could be hard to diagnose.

• “We have a friend who’s a certified computer repairman. In the last year he’s replaced our PC’s power supply, put in maximum RAM, and updated the hard drive to 500GB SATA.

  “This last update was done a matter of weeks ago, and since then the system is freezing from time to time — for perhaps 15 to 20 seconds — and then going again. During this time, the clock still clicks over the seconds.

  “I have the latest Comodo firewall installed, plus Microsoft’s antivirus, and I also have the firewall turned on in the DSL modem.”
  

Here’s what I’d check first: your recently replaced hard drive. The mini-hangs you describe sound like a hard-drive spin-up delay.

If the drive is set for aggressive power-savings, it may be spinning down too soon. When a drive is in a low-power standby state (sleeping), it has to wake and spin up before it can respond to read/write requests. That spin-up delay could indeed briefly hang whatever software was waiting for the drive, but it wouldn’t affect components such as the system clock.

Related posts:

1. Sluggish Spin-Up
2. “Spinning Down” A Hard Drive
3. SP2 Shutdown Hangs
4. PC Hangs When Adding New Hardware
5. Weird Problem