My desktop which operates on Windows 95, has developed a habit of freezing up every ten minutes. It doesn’t matter what program is running, everything stops every ten minutes for about ten seconds. Any suggestions?

I have been thinking about this question for a while now and it has really stumped me. I have narrowed it down to two possible areas which could be causing the problem. The first area may be applications which are running at the time and the second area is Windows itself. To test this theory, and to narrow it down to either a third-party application or Windows, I firstly suggest that you close all open applications. Once you have shut down all the visible applications, do a CTRL-ALT-DEL and close all other open applications (except the vital Windows applications and services such as ‘Explorer). If the problem still persists, it is probably a Windows problem. In this case all I can suggest is that you reinstall Windows, and before you start down this path, you should backup all of your data which you want to keep (eg. documents). I would normally suggest that you upgrade Windows but I’m not going to in this case because Windows Me (the next version in the Windows 9x family) is going to be released in a few months so it would be a waste of money to upgrade now. However, if the problem doesn’t persist after closing all applications, reboot your computer and close them down one by one and by doing this, you should be able to narrow down the culprit application. Once you have found the culprit, I suggest you prevent it from loading at startup (unless it is a vital application) and only open the application on an as needed basis. Please note that in the ‘Startup’ group on the start menu does not list all applications which load at startup. Such startup applications are listed in the registry. If this is the case with your culprit application (ie. it is not listed in the ‘Startup’ group) I suggest you don’t try and go after it, just close it manually each time you use your computer.