Hard Drives Question

It sounds an awful lot like you have power savings on, and it's shutting down your hard drives after a certain # of hours. I'd bet the pause is your hard drive(s) coming up to speed, which takes about 2 seconds.

Go to Control Panel --> Power Options, and see what it says for "Turn off hard disks:"

Change that setting to "Never".

I'm having the same problem on my work laptop. I tired catching the application that was hanging my system, but couldn't. Filemon and task info never showed anything, they hung when the system hung. I replaced the drive and that seemed to do the trick for me, but the drive was formated and is being used symptom free in another system. Mystery for me.

But try running some dos diags on your drive, mine never showed anything, but IBM utilities suck anyway.
You could also have a bad bit of memory. Memtest in your free time.

Yeah, that's what I was going to do but I wanted to make sure it wouldn't mess with the software on the drive.

The software that hung, this morning actually, is WinAmp, but it also does it on other things sometimes, like if I'm emptying the recylcing bin, it might take a second more than it should, or opening up a window in the explorer takes longer than it should. There doesn't seem to be any sort of pattern, it's just kind of random. I'm pretty sure I don't have any power saving on, but I'll check when I get home. I'll also change the jumper settings and see if that helps. I'll check the manufacturers sites to see if they have any diagnostic software I can run too. Thanks for the input, I'll let ya know if it gets fixed or not.

My two cents. I would do what Bmouring said with the jumpers. Just for the record, RAM is often the culprit when software fails to run or load properly. Just my pennys worth.