Need help with new stuttering problem

[wildside50]

Here are the symptoms -- Every few minutes or so, whatever aplication I am working on stops responding for about 3-5 seconds. The mouse still moves just fine, and in fact I can click on another open program and it is running fine. The HDD light is on during these hiccups. It happens in IE a lot, and while watching things in Media Player (that gets annoying fast...), and once or twice I've seen it happen in games.

System:

Opteron 170
1 GB Gskill RAM (part of a 2 gig set, but the other stick is on RMA)
200 GB Maxtor HDD
DFI CFX3200 mobo
x1950 Pro video card

Now -- this didn't use to happen. I haven't really changed anything, and nothing hardware wise, that would ellicit this kind of behavior. Anyone have any suggestions? I don't wanna reformat just to find out that helped nothing. I defragged hoping that would help, installed the newest CPU driver, bios, nothing helps.

 

[pepsimax2k]

a wild guess but... something to do with pageing memory to disk? which could indicate a problem with either. have you run memtest and scandisc? running pagedefrag might help to, or altering the position / size of the page file. i may be way off the mark though

 

[SolMiester]

Have you adjusted the page file since removing the 1 stick of RAM?

 

[wildside50]

Originally posted by: SolMiester
Have you adjusted the page file since removing the 1 stick of RAM?

No I did not adjust anything. Should I have?

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: wildside50

Originally posted by: SolMiester
Have you adjusted the page file since removing the 1 stick of RAM?

No I did not adjust anything. Should I have?

No, not as long as you have it set to let Windows decide how big to make it. If you had it set to 2048 MB, then yeah, you should change it to 3072 MB.