There is a one second lag spike that lasts 1 second every 2 seconds when the CPU is under load, it seems.. that lasts for a couple minutes then will go away and be smooth for a while, but this lag spike seems to freeze everything, mouse stops working for a second, games freeze for a second, everything. It will randomly appear while in game.I've had this problem in the past, but switching the postion of the IDE cables on my HD and CD drive worked for me. I've done that and it doesn't work. I suspect it's the harddrive because it did this before, and when it's in this condition, it takes well over a minutes to boot into XP, whereas it would normally take about 10-15 seconds to boot into XP from the XP loading screen. I'm just wondering if it could possibly be anything else that could cause this problem besides my HD. Thanks in advance.