Problems with my computer.

[Mystic Muse]

There's the main one, and a few other ones that bother me a bit, but aren't significant problems.

The main one is that my computer will randomly stop responding. I can still move my mouse, but it won't let me click on anything, and if there's a video running, the sound becomes slow and unintelligible. I have to turn off my computer to get it to go away, but I'd rather not do that if I don't have to. sometimes, I have to turn off the computer again while it's loading up because it won't load. I have Spybot search and destroy but it isn't detecting any viruses so I don't think that's it. If there's a better free antivirus that'll work I'd be willing to run that too.

The computer is a compaq presario cq-62 215dx with windows 7 64 bit home premium.

the rather insignificant problems are, sometimes when I put the computer on standby while watching a video, it'll just repeat about a second of the video continually when I start the computer back up and sometimes when the computer comes off standby, I can't scroll on web pages or go to a different tab.

I don't know if a list of my programs would help, but if so, I'll post those too.

[factotum]

Spybot Search and Destroy isn't an anti-virus program, AFAIK--it just scans your system for spyware, it won't pick up viruses!

Anyway, if you press CTRL+ALT+DEL when it does this and start Task Manager (assuming you can do that), is the CPU usage shown very high? If so, which process is using all that CPU time?

[Deathslayer7]

Download "Avast!" It's free and it checks for viruses. Malware Bytes isn't a bad option from what I hear, and it too is free.

As to your problem, I have no idea.

[Erloas]

How easily can you reproduce this problem? Does it happen consistently or just rarely?

When it gets unresponsive can you still open the task manager? As Factotum suggested, if you can monitor processor usage and find a process using up all of your cpu that can make it easier to figure out what the problem is.

The other problem that at least seems reasonable likely to me is if a piece of hardware is failing. Something like a hard drive or CD/DVD drive would be most likely to cause something like that.

Sometimes things like this can be narrowed down rather quickly by opening up the event viewer (under administrator tools in the control panel, or put eventvwr into the run/search box... as least as long as they haven't renamed it, just have XP at work to check) and checking for errors that show up under... usually system. There will usually be some, but depending on the type and how often they occur that can narrow things down. Especially helpful to check just after you restart after the problem, then you can check for errors that happened just a few minutes ago.

[Snow Leopard]

How easily can you reproduce this problem? Does it happen consistently or just rarely?

When it gets unresponsive can you still open the task manager? As Factotum suggested, if you can monitor processor usage and find a process using up all of your cpu that can make it easier to figure out what the problem is.

The other problem that at least seems reasonable likely to me is if a piece of hardware is failing. Something like a hard drive or CD/DVD drive would be most likely to cause something like that.

Sometimes things like this can be narrowed down rather quickly by opening up the event viewer (under administrator tools in the control panel, or put eventvwr into the run/search box... as least as long as they haven't renamed it, just have XP at work to check) and checking for errors that show up under... usually system. There will usually be some, but depending on the type and how often they occur that can narrow things down. Especially helpful to check just after you restart after the problem, then you can check for errors that happened just a few minutes ago.

As Erloas suggested, an HDD failure could be the problem.

Let's perfom some tests to check the integrity, an useful tool could be this one (http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools)