Asus M50Sa freezes up, seemingly randomly

Hi!

I bought an Asus M50Sa less than two months ago. I've been using it quite actively, and have noticed that it has this strange problem. Every now and then it freezes up for about 5 minutes or so. The led indicating HDD activity is on all that time. After that, it just recovers by itself as if nothing happened. Also, when the notebook recovers, it makes this silent *click*-sound. This can happen no matter what I'm doing: playing, surfing the net or going through my files. I can't find any kind of pattern in it.

Specs:
Windows Vista Home Premium
Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 @ 2.40 GHz
3GB memory

One thing I really wouldn't like to do is opening up the notebook. I've read some articles/posts suggesting that it might be a HDD related problem.

So, what are you suggestions for fixing this problem? Should the next step be perhaps reinstalling Windows, or contacting the retailer? Or are there any good softwares for identifying what the problem actually is?

Thank you in advance for your help!

 

Seems as if the HDD parks the head.. and then goes into some kind of low power state, and then it takes time to resume working.. You can try to disable "turn off HDD to save power", in Vista power management settings..