PC halts for a second or 2

my pc halts for a second or 2 and resumes normal. i also hear a noise from the hard disk when i try to load some heavy app or play songs.

i checked for bad sectors & tried chkdsk but it didnt show any defects.

my pc is only a week old. so that i have a warranty for it. im just wandering whether i can fix this problem.

specs :
amd sempron 2400+
gigabyte mothe board
256mb ram 333
hitachi 80gb sata HDD
mx4000 64mb vga

i have installed kaspersky anti virus.

 

this is quit normal,pc's do stutter when you stress them,running only 256mb of memory is also slowing you down,your computer will be doing alot of swapping with the page file,this takes its toll on the harddrive and causes stuttering,upgrading 512 mb of ram will help,you could also try manually fixing the page file to stop windows keep re sizing it every 5 mins.

Try this I assume since its a new comp your on win xp,

START MENU,CONTROL PANEL,SYSTEM,ADVANCED,IN THE PERFORMANCE BOX CLICK SETTINGS,CLICK THE ADVANCED TAB,At the virtual memory settings at the bottom click CHANGE set the min and max to 1024,a nice chunk of harddrive for your comp to play with.

 

i dont think that its the page file. i dont get the noise when loading heavy appz. i just get it if i suddenly start something after idling. im not sure whether the hard disk stops when im idling & restarting while requesting for a task.