Mouse and sound hesitate repeatedly

[Jasonf]

I have a T60 running Win XP SP3. When I first boot up everything works perfectly. After a while 2 symptoms start occurring. One, as you move the mouse the pointer "freezes" about every 1 second or so for an instant. The other symptom is that if you try to play a video, sounds, or a game, the sound and or image freezes and skips in a similar fashion.

If I look at Task Manager when I first boot up, the CPU Usage is zero. When this problem starts, the Performance grid shows a repeated "saw" pattern where CPU % usage is 0, 27, 26, 18, 0. Just repeated spikes to 27 or 28% over and over. I look at the list of processes and they are no different than when the problem is not occurring. My System Idle is 99% and nothing shows that it is hitting the CPU more than 1%.

I've done a lot of searching and seen many other posts that are similar to this but nothing matches exactly. Being connected to the internet and/or having a browser open has no effect. I ran a scan with MSE and it came up clean.

Thanks in advance,

--Jason

[GACrabill]

Please give us a little more information :
- are all Windows updates installed ?
- are all Critical and Recommended Lenovo System Updates installed ?
- have you run the free Malwarebytes to remove malware ?
- have you run the free TDSSKiller from Kaspersky to remove rootkit infections ?
- have you temporarily disabled your T60 wireless to see if the cursor jerkiness stops ?
- have you ran a chkdsk to fix any hard drive issues ?

[TuuS]

It sounds like your system is low on resources. Do you have a lot of free harddrive space? low on ram memory?

You may have a system infected with some malware too.

[Jasonf]

Thanks GACrabill! I got to #1 on your list and that did it. I had installed all the critical windows updates but not the optional ones. I should have paid more attention to what the updates were so I could try and guess which one cured the problem. TuuS, I considered both your suggestions previously and neither were the case...but thanks too!