Hi,

One of the PCs here has recently developed this rather mystifying habit of
freezing sometimes.

It happens randomly and lasts for about ten seconds or so. Also, it can
happen anywhere from a few times within an hour to a few times in a day. And
it happens no matter what the application running on the machine at that
time. It was observed that even the screensaver freezes!

Virus, malware, trojans, spyware, adware...... were checked for. Also SFC
/scannow was run without any problems. So was chkdsk /r.

The hard drive was swapped with its "mirror" (a simple restoring the
standard back-up to a fresh drive) - the phenomenon still persisted. The
memory was swapped out too, to no avail.

Occasionally a clicking noise can be heard, like that of a hard drive
"waking up". This happened on both the original drive as well as the
replacement one. Motherboard power and drive time-out settings are selected
properly.

Someone suggested replacing the power supply.

Any suggestions on what to look for very much welcome.

Regards and thanks in anticipation.

Mobius