Hello! This is my first ever post regarding a computer issue. I can almost always find answers to my issues from other people's posts, but in this case after several days of searching, I'm biting the bullet and submitting my own.
Thanks in advance for any and all help and advice.
First of all, my computer is a Dell XPS 400 which I purchased around 8 years ago and customized with a few different pieces. My board is chipset i945P/G and my processor is an Intel Pentium D CPU 2.80Ghz. I am using 4x1 GB of DDR2-SDRAM at 266 MHz. For a long time the computer ran off of an 80GB SATA150 HDD (Maxtor 6L080M0) and I used a WD (WD2500JS-08MHB0) 250 GB drive as a slave. I then obtained a Hitachi (HDS5C3020ALA632) 2 TB drive and subsequently was able to get Windows 7 for free as a student through Microsoft's DreamSpark program (good for 2 years). So I decided to install Windows 7 on the current slave drive (Western Digital - 250GB), move all my music and video files to the Hitachi 2 TB drive making that the slave, installing a system partition to the new Windows 7 drive and eliminating the relatively small 80 GB Maxtor. That turned out to be more complicated than I had anticipated, and after running the new system for a couple weeks, I have noticed two issues I need help solving:
1) The computer has short freezing spells that last between 15 and 60 seconds. This happens every 15-30 minutes and typically when I am using a browser of some kind (but not always). I initially thought maybe Windows 7 just takes that much more in the way of resources to run and my computer is getting bogged down, but I'm not sure that is the case, and I'd love to solve it. Its fair to say I multi-task and have quite a few programs running at once (Chrome, Firefox, iTunes, Excel are common). I have tried to cut each of those programs out to narrow it down with no luck. The freezing seems to happen regardless. The only times it never freezes is if I am playing a game on an emulator or something like that. It may in fact be freezing in the background, but I have no evidence of that.
2) The second issue has been becoming more frequent. Often times if I am away from my computer for several hours (usually over night, yesterday it happened just from being away from home for 6 hours or so), I return to see my computer at a DOS screen saying it can't find a drive in the SATA 0 spot. This is the Western Digital drive slot. I check all the cables, nothing seems to be out of order, so I reboot and it is fine. I don't even know what happens in between to get the computer to that screen, that's just how I find it.
Those are my two issues. Neither of them every occurred before switching to Windows 7. Any thoughts?
I recognize that my stuff is old and that lack of resources or old equipment could be the answer, but I don't have the money to buy anything new, so I am trying to exhaust other troubleshooting options before giving up.
-Mave
PS - Hopefully this is in the correct section!