What makes windows do this!

[RedSox]

OK, its not a BSOD, its not a FREEZE, but lets say you are hmmmm, un raring some files (or unzipping), open a browser, and at the same time, move a 4GB file, then out of knowhere it FREEZES....but not really, you know you either have to wait, for real, 5+ minutes as nothing you click works, there is no FORCE QUIT, the ctrl-alt-delte does nothing, or HARD SHUT DOWN!

 

I have a hack n tosh and this never seems to happen.

 

What is it in WINDOWS that does this?

 

 

I do audio recording and sometimes this one glitch BUG happens then too and it drives me up a wall. Can't wait to go all mac as soon as Giga is MAC compatible.

 

Thanks.

 

(( Vista, although I am talking about XP, takes about 2 minutes to boot, bye bye M$FT!))

 

Thanks!

[Metrogirl]

Lots of potential causes for this behaviour, not least your system running out of steam. Getting I/O bound on a single HDD is one possibility. Having a firewall or real-time virus checker can cause problems like this if every process gets inspected before it runs. Firewalls can block legitimate calls to Verisign making new programs appear to hang for ages on installation. Bad movie files, images or other files which Windows Explorer tries to create icons or thumbnails for are well known for causing slow or stalled system response. Inadequate or failing memory or a hard disk which is going bad, IRQ conflicts or other hardware issues can be a real pain to diagnose and can certainly cause the sort of problem you describe.

 

So there's no simple explanation from the rather generalised description you give, but you can probably narrow down the cause by performing only three of the four operations simultaneously and seeing which one has the unwanted effect. Or trying to use different files. Trial and error, that's the key. For what it's worth my XP system is pretty snappy despite having been running for over a year and a half since first installation and handling heavy-duty applications, so issues like you describe are not a de-facto feature of Windows.