Weird "hiccups" evrery 2-3 seconds - Page 2

nope, didn't solve the problem

first pic is my problematic laptop, which jumps b/w 0% and 20% constantly
the next one is my desktop as a reference. seems much smoother, though its spec is probably worse, with more programs running

how do I show disk access and network bandwidth utilization? the network tab doesn't show anything

Actually I don't
I just left it as how it was...
Is that a big no-no?

well unfortunately, that doesn't solve the problem either
I even went through a defrag and still the same

haha I think it's the taks manager itself...

nothing unusual
just "taskmgr" and "system"

Oh and I thought the audio problem was solved
but it hasn't
audio files still lag like video files

oh my gosh that sounds horrible!

so here's a little story with my laptop (and why I swore myself to never buy anything from dell ever again. if I happen to get one for free, it goes straight to ebay)

I bought this i600m way back in 2003 with 1 year warranty.
About a month before the warranty ended, the laptop turned itself off while writing some paper.
That was a motherboard failure.
There also was a huge black discoloring on the left palm rest due to the hdd's heat, which I complained about also when returning the laptop for repair. Dell said it's quite ordinary (yeah ok) so they didn't do anything about it.
Last year, while writing some paper (gee what are the odds?) the laptop shut off again, with pretty much the same problem. Obviously I was pissed and called dell with no avail. After all, the warranty WAS gone
Knowing there are enough people interested in broken laptops for parts, I put this junk on ebay, with a brief explanation about the "burnt palm rest." About a day before the auction ends, someone pm'ed me about the palm rest, saying that according to his experience, that's not really a "typical" case.
Of course that really set me off.
I called dell but took too long so went online for chat support.
I rampaged on about how they lied to me about the palm rest and the agent on the other side sorta got scared (are you suffering from actual physical damage? etc). Obviously taking advantage of this, I went on and on bashing the poor guy, even though it's not his fault
soon after he said he'll talk to his supervisor and a few days later, a new laptop (the same discontinued i600m however) came, with upgraded screen resolution, more hdd, and better cpu.
The discoloring was significantly reduced. However, there were other problems. The power button started to get peeled off (that's a first) and the keyboard LED's started not working, along with the volume control buttons near that part. Very soon after, I noticed that the '4' key was extremely sensitive--as in, I can very lightly tab on it and it "activates."
And a few days earlier, whether it's hardware or not, this intermittent lagging happens.

Well I'm planning to get a tablet pc anyways but I was gonna wait for santa rosa

that is extremely hard to tell, as it's not as dramatic as the "freezing period" is very short--as in much less than 1 sec short.

I kinda tested this by moving an open widow randomly across the screen. Instead of seamlessly getting dragged by the mouse pointer, it "lags" every second. So I guess it's not just for playing video or music files.

Btw, what program did you use? I want to test it out also.