Computer Problem - Heistating/Freezing

I’m running a rapidly aging Homebuild PC that’s been showing signs of failure as of late. I’m not in a position to really afford a new PC nor to do a complete rebuild at the moment so I’m hoping to band-aid this thing in order to get a few more months out of it.

A couple months ago it was freezing completely a couple times every day. I did a squeaky clean install of XP Pro and that didn’t fix anything. I yanked an old HD out of the box and reseated all the memory and the video card and did the trick. I feel pretty confident that it was the old HD that was the problem.

The last couple days I’ve been seeing a strange issue where my cursor will freeze up. I’m pretty sure it’s the whole system that’s hung and not just the mouse but I haven’t been in a situation where I can really test that yet. What makes it so strange is that after about a 10 or 20 second pause it’ll free up and start working again. I’m not sure what the hell could be causing something like that from a hardware standpoint.

Do anyone have any ideas of how to diagnose this? Anyone seen it before?

It’s worth noting that I just upgraded to XP Service Pack 3 and Zune 2.5 so one of those could have introduced the issue, but it was fine for a half day before this started happening. Ideas?

OK, I just realized that I was able to make my browser go back using my keyboard while the mouse cursor is frozen so it seems pretty clear that it’s a mouse issue.

I’m using a Logitech Wireless Laser mouse and just reset the wireless connection. Curious to determine if it’s a mouse hardware issue (the batteries were just replaced yesterday) or if there’s something screwey with the Mouse software and the XP SP3 update. Strange…

How far is your mouse from the transmitter? I have had problems with a wireless mouse when it was more than about 18 inches from the transmitter.

About 24 inches. The receiver is to the left of the monitor and I steer on th right. I popped out the batteries and let is sit to power down for a few minutes and reloaded them. Seems to be better now. We’ll have to see if it’s intermittent.