Attached is the screenshot of what my computer was doing when my hardware started "hiccuping" -- that is, while I'm doing something it would randomly freeze for a brief period of time and if sound is playing it would make a purring sound.
I tried tracing it to my USB, which I would think would be causing errors, because I tried reinstalling drivers no less than five days ago. The worst offender would have to be the SD card slot. Another problem device could be my network card, since "interrupts" could cause some older hardware to hiccup.
The last full disk check on the system volume was done less than 3 days ago. Well, it seems I traced it down to one of my background programs, which was trying to run an Internet speed test and bottlenecked everything all at once. It has been uninstalled.