I've been having a recurring issue for the last couple of months. It started with IE 7 and Windows Media Player so I switched to iTunes and FireFox as my primary music and browser. I'm not experiencing the problem with FireFox as well. Periodically, the browser or application will freeze and the hard drive will make a rhythmic chugging sound. sort of a (bear with me) chug, ch-chug, ch-chug, ch-chug, ch-ccchhhhhuuuuuugggg and then it'll get back to normal. Typically, these freezes last no more than 5-10 seconds, but sometimes they will go on for minutes and will require a hard power-down. I thought maybe it was my virus software (McAfee) so I uninstalled it and loaded AVG, but I'm still having the problem. It's more of a nuisance than a major issue, but I do run ProTools and am afraid that it will mess up my recordings.1 person needs an answerI do too

Oh, also, when this problem began, Windows Update was not able to load the updates. I would power down when there were updates present and the machine would go into that chug, ch-chug, ch-chug and eventually say that the updates couldn't be loaded. There was a problem with the .net v1.1. I called into Microsoft Security and they were able to fix the update problem - updates now load normally, but I'm still getting the chug, ch-chug, ch-chug freezing issue.