Could this be a hardware problem?

A computer at work has been acting strangely of late. It will be working fine, running all programs on the server and accessing the internet. Then all of a sudden it will basically freeze up. IE will load and start accessing the homepage but will just hang there. Programs that were running will freeze and have to be ended with task manager. If the pc was in the middle of a program, task manager will show that application using 100%. If no program was running, task manager will show 0% usage. A shared printer that hangs off the pc won't print.

When the pc (a Dell Dimension 2300, running XP Pro) is rebooted, everything works fine. For a while. Then it freezes up again. This can happen 6 times during the day. It just started happening this week, although no settings, software or hardware have been added or changed.

I've run adaware and norton (updated, of course) in both normal and safe mode (after disabling system restore and going through the normal steps). I've run trendmicro's housecall off the net. No infections or spyware have been detected at all.

Has anyone experienced anything like this?

All suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

Disable Norton and try again.

 

Make sure you have all the Windows Updates available.

Also check Dell's website for updates. They have some BIOS and hard disk firmware updates for some systems. You will want to make sure everything is up to date.

After that if you still have issues, check how much RAM you have and how much of that RAM is being used.

 

maybe test your memory?
http://majorgeeks.com/download1247.html

 

Thanks for the suggestions. However, I had already installed all Windows and Dell updates and had tried disabling Norton. I'll try the memory test and see if that shows anything.