Anatomy of a hang

[Undertoad]

It's another one of those thread titles that sounds dirty but isn't.

Like every PC ever known, my current desktop PC is going through a painful period. It's experiencing intermittent hangs. Freezes.

I'm an experienced problem-solver; I did it for a living for a while. But I have no idea why mine is having this problem, so I figured I'd list what I did, and what I do, to try to figure this one out.

The symptom: well, usually it happens in Firefox. I'm opening up tabs, or scrolling, or doing something, when the system stops being responsive. The cursor may go to an hourglass in the Firefox window. For about 10 seconds the system may be able to do other things; I may be able to hit ctrl-alt-del to get to the windows task manager, or I may be able to switch windows, or I may be able to highlight a desktop icon. Or I may be able to do none of this.

I think I may usually be doing memory-intensive operations when it happens. I don't think it will happen right now, for example; all I'm doing is typing into the edit box, so I'm thinking it'll stay stable during this period.

Just in case, I'll save this post It's the "symptoms" part, and next I'll say what I think so far.