My system freeze for a minute & then continues

sounds like memory problems
run a mem test

This has happened to me before on account of a dying HDD. It would freeze the computer, than I could hear the HDD slowly stop spinning, then it would start spinning again and the computer would resume its activities. It was a Seagate drive. May not be the case, but check it anyway.

i'll check for memory...
about the hard disk - is there a program that checks when it stops spinning?
thanks

memtest showed that the ram was bad
i took out 1Gb (out of 2Gb) & its more stable
(i think that its 80% ram problem & 20% hdd problem)
about the hard disk - is there a program that checks when it stops spinning?
thanks

I thought this would be failing hard drive, didn't think memory would cause a stutter (vs. blue screens, etc,). To check drive get the SMART data from the drive. Goto device manager, find brand of hard drive (there are only a few makers) goto their web site, download diagnostic. Display smart data. Run short and long drive tests. GThen force a chkdsk by open computer, rite click on drive, tools, error check when asked say on next boot.

Smart data's job is to monitor and predict drive failure. Not perfect, but I've replace working drives called out by smart data.

From wikipedia.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology; often written as SMART) is a monitoring system for computer hard disk drives to detect and report on various indicators of reliability, in the hope of anticipating failures.

edit: look for fields like "Seek Error Rate" and "Read Error Rate" and "Reallocated Sectors Count" and "Recalibration Retries or Calibration Retry Count" and "Soft Read Error Rate" .... in the smart data. The tool should format the raw data for you and add labels like these copied from wikipedia.

+1 I've seen exactly the same thing. On older drives this was called recalibrate seek. What the disk head read off the track was not the expected position on disk. Older drives used to have to recalibrate when they warmed up or cooled off. Not sure what happens now.