PC slow and nonstop freezing

Hey there, I just started having a strange problem 2 days ago. After playing closing a game and opening firefox, my pc started frequently freezing for about 1-2 minutes at a time. No matter what program I open or what I click it will freeze for a minute and run very slow. It just did this randomly out of nowhere I don't know what could have caused it.

I have tried virus scans, ccleaner, disk defragment, deleting temp files but still poblem exists.

When I run in safe mode it doesn't freeze but it runs extremely slow. And also for some reason I have no restore points in system restore also.

I have windows XP.

The strangest thing though is that I tried running a game and the game runs just fine. I ran counterstrike at full frames without any lag or freezing for a good 30 minutes but once I close it everything else still freezes.

It is almost impossible to use the computer like this I had to post this on my iPod because it was too slow. I am starting school this Friday and have online classes so I really need some help! Thanks in advance.
 
It is an emachines T5212.

Intel pentium d 805 2.66ghz CPU

2 gb single-channel ddr2 @ 332mhz

195gb hitachi hdd

Geforce 8800gs 384 mb

OS windows xp home 32 bit sp3

Virus checkers I used were Avira and SUPERAntiSpyware both free editions.

I'm not sure what you mean temp file thing I just manually deleted the temp files.

I also have HiJackThis installed but I don't know how to use it and I havent messed with it yet.
 
Oh and I don't know if it matters but when it freezes I can still move the mouse pointer around, I just can't click or do anything until it unfreezes.
 
I watched the video and I looked pretty thoroughly around the CPU and the motherboard and didn't see anything like that. It actually wasn't even very dusty surprisingly, I expected it to be clogged with dust. This computer was sitting in garage for years it hasn't been used very much just a few months since I took it out and it's worked fine.

It kind of seems to me like it can't be a hardware problem because games all run fine. I tried fallout new vegas yesterday, it froze up a little at first but afterthat it ran fine no freezing for a good 40 minutes til I got bored.
 
I put a different harddrive I borrowed from somebody and it works fine in there. It can't be the power supply or hardware problem unless its the harddrive itself.
 
You might try re-loading XP fresh... Some piece of hardware might fail right after or during this process
 
It is never a wise thing to remove installed Windows Updates manually... A clean Windows install will take care or reveal problems in all these issues as I have said
 
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