Computer randomly freezes

First off my system specs:
AMD Sempron 3100+
512MB CL3 RAM
Asus Radeon 9200SE
Abit NF8-series motherboard nForce 3

I have tried playing NOLF2, BF 1942 and Red Alert 2. All games at some point suddenly halts, the time halted varies from time to time. The games always manages to recover from it but it is very disturbing having the games taking random pauses for you. Anybody knows what might cause it?

either there are background processes that are doing something in-game that hog your memory, or maybe you have a fan going bad and creating high temperatures. what happens to the game, does the game just freeze with an image on it? any artifacts? etc?

Which distro are you using?

>>3
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Either help out or get out, trollfag.

>>1
If it's just pausing or stuttering, overheating doesn't sound like the cause - an overheat usually has more serious symptoms than just momentary halting. Are you running any anti-virus/anti-spyware applications that perform automatic scans? Anything else that regularly does stuff in the background? Run MSCONFIG and remove all the startup items and see if it makes a difference (check the startup folder in your start menu too). If so, put back the startup items one or two at a time, and when the problem returns you've found which program is eating up your CPU cycles and causing the halts. Worth a try.

Something else to try is (re)installing the latest drivers for your video card.

this sound alot like some background program accessing the disk suddenly, alot, for a few seconds.

so yea, check for spyware, or some shitty av program like norton

yeah check your processes in the task manager a lot of stuff in there you dont need to run in windows but make sure you know what you are doing or it will fuck up as usual