Touchpad/ keyboard freezing  

Hi,

The Problem
Monday afternoon I turned my computer on and noticed that every two minutes or so the computer would freeze up for up to 15 seconds, after which I had another one-two minutes of uninterrupted use and then it would freeze again.

The Computer

• Dell Inspirion Laptop E1705/9400
• Windows 7 and Windows xp
• 40gb and 120gb HDD
• 1gb ram
• Dual core (centrino?)cpu
• need more info? ask.

(only on W7)I'd done two major things in the past week and neither one of them could have had caused this because there'd been so much time in between. The first was I networked a couple folders on my hard drive so they were accessible on the rest of my home network (on Friday). Second I'd installed GIMP on my computer (Saturday night).

(only on W7)I did a restore point from about a week ago, still had the same problem, then I tried uninstalling GIMP and turning off file sharing, still nada.

I thought maybe it was a software problem and because I had a website due in a couple hours I thought I'd swap out the Windows 7 hard drive which I was using and instead use a hard drive with Xp, Oddly enough all the problems I've mentioned up to now and the problems I'll mention persisted on both platforms (unless otherwise stated), also note I hadn't used Xp in months (about 3 months ago was the last time I'd used it in a computer.)

After messing around some more I noticed that my touch pad wasn't working at all (I'd been using a external wireless mouse until then) The drivers somehow uninstalled themselves and pretended to not work when I reinstalled them.

The only thing that kinda worked was booting in safe mode, then the courser would freeze but not anything else. When you look at this with the fact that the touch-pad doesn't work and the problem persists cross-platform, it begins to look like a BIOS or hardware problem, not a software thing.

Other Weird Phenomenon

• (only on W7) Stumble Upon doesn't show up in the toolbar even when it's enabled and checked off as supposed to be there, in Firefox.[this one is just weird... it could be that I updated it and didn't realize and it's not playing nice with some other add-on, I'll look into that.)
• On screen keyboard also wont work in safe mode while courser is frozen (but mouse isn't).
• When I access files through file sharing from a different computer they are also subject to freezing, meaning that if I have a HTML file open in notepad ++ ( that's on the laptop) every two minutes or so it'll freeze up for 10-15 seconds.

I'll keep you posted of new developments.
Please Help me, I'm at my wits end!!
Thank you.

@squonksc ok I'll look into that.

@zigzag3143 yes I did that and I can't tell what is causing the problems, java was taking a huge amount (because I needed the server on to compile...) but turning that off didn't help, explorer is also taking up a lot but I can't turn that off.

@squonksc Yes but why did it choose to die now, after six months of good use(on windows 7, and 5 years of good use on xp)?

I turned java off, but the computer still froze, also explorer is taking about 50000 in private and 70000 in physical, I have no idea what any of that means, (but it seems like a lot compared to other computers where explorer takes about 14-20000,) I'll take a screen shot the next time I turn that computer on.

btw this is only in windows 7, I don't even have java installed in xp, in fact basically all I did in xp was notice that it too was freezing in much the same way as windows 7 and the touchpad didn't work at all, it seemed as if it had uninstalled it self, because when I went to mouse settings there was only the generic set of tabs for mice, not the ones specific to the touchpad.

Also in windows 7 when I tried to reinstall the drivers for the touchpad, windows said that "To install the Synaptics touchpad driver a touchpad must be installed on this computer"

New Developments(in Windows 7 only)

I took apart my computer, dusted it (though it wasn't that dusty to begin with) and put it back together.

I then thought I might check the bios, just to see if anything looked out of place, while there I noticed that BIOS would freeze the same way the OS froze (10-15 second freezes every 1-2 minutes, except that in BIOS it froze for about 15 seconds every 45 seconds).

While I was taking apart my computer I needed to access some info on the hard drive so I used a external case to hook it up to another machine(via USB), I couldn't remove it safely so I just pulled it out, when I put it back into my laptop it worked fine but after a restart it said there were errors on the HDD and it had to repair them.

After about 2 hours it said that if it restarted normally everything was fine other wise it couldn't repair the errors...and nothing. Well it didn't restart normally, so I'm not sure what to do... I get the windows 7 splash screen and then the mouse shows up but nothing else does. Restarting does nothing.

Does anyone have an idea about how to get the Hard drive working again? (forgetting for a second that the computer freezes every minute) right now all I get is a blank black screen with a mouse.
Remembering that it freezes...
Guys (and girls) please, I really really need help with this!!
I'm just so totally lost and I don't have money (or time) for a new laptop right now!