Performance hiccups...need help narrowing my search

[dmw16]

I have been noticing primarly in games that my computer has been acting very funny. It will pause for long periods of time and the IDE light will be going nuts. So I reboot and see that my cpu temp is 52-54C(I have an Athlon 1800+). This is higher than i like to see it, but should be within allowable temps. As for my harddrive, I have a 120GB WD w/ 8MB cache. I would expect good performance from the drive because of its cache, but could it be the problem? I am going to defrag it and run a surface scan. Also, incase it is important, I have 512MB of Crucial PC2100 and GF4 4200 w/128MB of RAM.
thanks,
-doug

edit: more info in following posts. Also, I am currently running Prime95 to see if i can get the temps up for sustained periods of time and see if the computer remains stable.

 

[QTPie]

did you try to open the side panel or order to lower the temp a little bit? My friend used to have that problem. Sometimes, the monitor temp. is inaccurate.

 

[dmw16]

I could try that. there is a lot of dust in my dorm room, so i try not to do that, but it may be worth a shot. The monitoring temp isn't very accurate, but i know what it reads when the chip gets flaky. So its all relative anyway.
-doug

 

[dmw16]

bump. Can anyone help me here? I am using Motherboard Monitor to keep tabs of temps. I was trying to track temps at the point where the computer starts to freeze. I was playing Flanker 2.0 and it freezes up and then comes back to life after I ctrl-alt-del. Then it acts up again. I would describe the problems more as hiccups than total freezes. I'm not really sure what is wrong though. According to motherboard monitor my cpu never broke 51C. That seems to be within an acceptable temp level. I also ran the western digital diag program on my drive and it found no problems. I'm really stumped.
-doug

 

[DaTT]

Usually when your hard drive run like mad during a game, its a sign of needing more RAM. But you stated you have 512, so that that should be sufficient. Only other thing I can think of is maybe you have some other programs running in the background.