Hello,
I'm new to the forum and was hoping the expertise here would assist me with a PC problem I have been having lately.

I noticed a few days ago that approximately every 20-30 seconds the entire machine would freeze up for a second or so, then resume working. I checked the task manager, and the spikes would take up approximately 55% of the processor's computing power. However, there was no indication of what program caused these spikes, as the System Idle Process would remain at 95-98% of CPU usage. Page File Usage remained constant and at normal levels. When listening to music, after a few spikes the track begins to get staticy. Additionally, when I reboot the machine, sometimes it just stays in the BIOS startup screen after doing the RAM check, without ever even continuing to scan the drives and other components.

Summary of Problems:
-CPU spikes every 20-30 seconds of 50-60% CPU capacity, freezing mouse, sound, and everything else.
-Does not boot or progress past the RAM check in BIOS sometimes, but then when started up hours later it boots normally.

Machine Specs:
AMD Athlon XP 2200 @ 1.8 GHz
1 GB of RAM
80 GB Harddrive of indeterminate make
AMIBIOS + Windows XP Home, Service Pack 3

I ran AVG anti-virus and anti-spyware, and they came up clean. Then I ran a rootkitrevealer search with these results: [see attachment]


The last two seem suspicious, but I do not know if this problem is a possible malware/virus infection, or if this is a hardware issue. If anyone has any idea what it could be, your help would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
-x2b4