Maybe one of you guys has an idea what's going on with my system...
It's been doing these strange lock-ups for a few months that always last about ~2 minutes. Every few hours, sometimes only every other day, in the middle of playing a game the system will just sort of half-freeze. Often the audio will keep playing, but sometimes it will get "stuck" as well. It has also happened once or twice while just browsing the net or messing with Steam. At first it always seems like the computer freezes completely, but it always responds to a ctrl-alt-del, showing me the Windows 7 screen with the options to lock the computer, start the task manager etc. It won't, however, do anything when I click on any of the options. Sometimes the ctrl-alt-del screen will come up, but it won't actually show the menu, instead I get the Win 7 "hourglass" and a message saying something like "security options are being prepared". Once the computer unfreezes, which it ALWAYS does after about 2 minutes, the menu will finally load. If I just don't do anything once it freezes, it'll go back to normal after 2 minutes, as if nothing happened, and I can resume playing the game or go back to doing whatever I was doing.
It's strange, because it just feels like a forced 2 minute break once a day or so with no apparent side effects, so it hasn't bothered me terribly. Sure, when you're in the middle of a crucial moment in a game it CAN be a bit annoying. Either way, this obviously SHOULDN'T happen and I'd like to know what's causing it. The system is completely stable otherwise.
Any ideas?
(For the record, I still don't have a lot installed on this machine. It's primarily used for gaming. Steam is on it and some other clients and gaming stuff. Drivers mostly for gaming peripherals, bluetooth and the like, then there's Dropbox, VLC and Chrome. That's it, more or less.)
