Temporary Freezing

Since I have recently reinstalled Windows XP Pro on my computer I have been encountering fairly regular freezing. The freezing will only last for around 10-15 seconds and happens every couple of hours, which is very frustrating when playing clan matches in Counter Strike. Whilst it is in this freeze, when happens randomly when doing anything, I cannot move the mouse (although the red beam is still on), use the keyboard, and if on the desktop I notice that the internet goes off in this time and if I am listening to music it will stop playing during the freeze.

Before I reinstalled XP, I have XP on another harddrive in the same computer which as far as I can remember was not encountering any problems. I have had overheating problems in the past, but this would always cause the computer to shut down rather than freeze, so I now run the computer with the side pannel off, which stops the shut downs from overheating. Although I'm unsure if this is doing danger of sucking in alot of dust, because the hard drive I used to have XP on recently died, which is still connected but disabled in device manager so I wouldn't suspect it of causing the freezing.

Also these problems do not leave any messages, the computer will reconnect to the internet and continue like nothing happened, there are no messages in the event viewer.

Specs:
AMD XP 3200+
nVidia 6600GT - Latest Drivers Installed.
512mb ram

 

If its dead take it out,a faulty harddrive can cause all kinds of problems,it needs to be eliminated

 

Well I took the old Hard Drive out, and disabled system restore because i thought it might be freezing whilst it makes a restore point, but it managed to freeze again.

 

Do you have anything running in the background? If so, what?