My hp laptop freezes randomly!

I have an HP Pavillion dv4 2112-tu , with intel i5-430m , no dedicated card , 3 gb ram , windows 7 home basic installed.
Since a couple of months I've been experiencing wierd freezing of the laptop while carrying out and random task.While browsing , playing games (like age of empires 3 or a very light one - shadowgun deadzone) , or even just moving stuff here and there , the laptop freezes for a good 15 seconds or so and stays like that only to work again normally from where it freezed . Sometimes these freezes occur quite frequently , sometimes they're less frequent. I've monitored cpu usage , ram usage from the performance monitor but I don't see anything wrong there. Help !

 

what sort of temperatures are you getting? and when was the last time you cleaned the fans and vents using compressed air as this needs to be done every 3-6 months.
normally very high temps will cause the lappy to shut down to protect the hardware but sometimes it can downclock as well and this can cause freeze ups.

lots of monitoring software in my sig below.

 

okay i checked the temps again now and they do seem to be on the higher side.
I got around 56-60 when idle , around 70 on medium load and around 80 or even higher 80's under load.
Are they okay or there is a problem ? I got it cleaned probably 7-8 months ago. The software i used was HWmonitor by cpu-id . I'd like to add that it is around 4 years old now. Also , the laptop hasn't shut itself down even once till now. The performance seems to be okay too , no lagging and stuff in programs but just the random 15 sec or so freezes .

 

It might be faulty hard drive.. I would try reinstalling the OS and see if this fixes it...

 

you could try running HD Tune to see if it finds any bad sectors. find it in my sig below.
2 or more can start causing major problems.

 

If your system isn't overheating that could be a sympton of a failing hard drive. I had similiar problem with a co-works laptop I reformatted and reinstalled the O/S and software and it worked fine that day and left it off for two days restarted and started to freeze and not respond and then it would respond. Tried with new HDD and rebooted the working image back onto the drive and so far powering up next day worked without problem will test again today and if the problem goes away then the freezing was probably linked to a drive going bad. It was a 2011 drive but probably was used alot that would contribute to the early retirement of the drive itself.

 

I would tend to agree with the above experts, it would be a good idea to test the RAM also, with MemTest86 - Offical Site of the x86 Memory Testing Tool (free version) or other RAM testing program that runs outside Windows also.

 

These temps are consistent with normal operations of HP laptops

A system can freeze for a variety of reason, the most frequent of which is during the performance of a computation complex task Based on your description, I suspect this may be what you're experiencing.

However, since there's many other things that can cause this, including the aforementioned HDD issue not working, you might want to monitor the freezes and your parameters then try to recreate that issue on another systems similar to yours.