I just upgraded my computer to AMD athelon 64 3500+ 1 gig samsung DDR400 RAM 80 gig maxtor HDD radeon 9600 SE chaintech S1689 motherboard When i first booted up, my windows had some kind of error, so i reformatted and used Win 2K it ran fine. Then i formatted again and got an SP2 WIN XP now my computer pauses every couple of seconds, and my AGP settings are always resetting and my gaming experience has been less than acceptable. any idea's what's wrong?

Bridget, my guess is malware. Anything running in the background demands attention and uses up machine cycles which slows your refresh rate, If you have enough stuff running, it can slow your machine to unacceptable levels. HTH. Ed in Texas.

I too have this problem. For about 20 seconds the system freezes, with processor activity falling to zero according to Task Manager.Then for maybe 3 seconds processor activity jumps to about 93% and the system unfreezes. It's possible to enter commands during this brief interval that are eventually executed, but with the system operational only 3 of every 20 seconds, it takes some time. The problem recurs randomly and can be temporaily fixed by rebooting. I've scanned with the Trend Micro online antivirus service (trendmicro.housecall.com) and regularly use the free version of Lavasoft's Ad-Aware SE Personal anti-adware package. Neither has found any thing out of the ordinary. I have the Windows XP service pack 2 firewall installed and turned on. Any Ideas?