Freeze Up

1. Have you cleared out your temporary Internet files recently?
If not, you may be near the set cache size, and windows needs to identify and remove the older cache files before it adds the new ones.
Also, if your hard drive has less than 10% free, you may be running out of virtual memory. This can also cause things to slow down.
Do a good search for un-needed files (clear out files older than 1 week out of windows\temp), scandisk, and defrag your hard drive to improve performance.

2. Is your DSL modem an internal, or USB device? I have read of numerous problems with some internal and USB DSL modems and some ISPs.
Check out the forum for your modem / ISP at www.dslreports.com for more resources.

3. Check with your ISP / modem mfg for driver updates.

I have found that my ISP is using my system (without my permission, nor with notificcation) as a server at times. when I questioned them about this they only offered my an opportunity to contact theeir Tech Support to remove it.
I discoveredthis by running ZoneAlarm Pro and started locking down my system to determine what was coming in and what was going out.
I am not saying that it is your case, but you might check to see what is going on with your system
You can open Close Dialog Box (Ctrl+Alt+Del) to see what TSRs are running in the backgroung. You can use a search engine to lookup and even contact developer of the product to get more insight. You can also use Find/Search File feature in Windows to locate the source of the file to help determine what program it belongs to.
I believe that this might provide you some help in locating the source of your 'freeze up' every 5 minutes. What does you ISP say concerning this situation? Push to speak to a senior technician if need be to get some real information about what is going on whith the connectiion you have with them.
"The Missing Link"

In general do you notice a lot of hard drive chatter? i.e. do you notice your hard drive on and the drive spinning constantly? If you do you may want to look into increasing your memory on this p.c. While you're at it, make sure you get the best and fastest memory you can for the money. I would also make sure you have the latest hardware drivers installed (video, mobo, modem, sound card, etc.) Also while your looking at manufacuter sites, make sure those devices are all Windows ME compliant, if not now is good time to replace those old components - if they are indeed old. I would also make sure you don't have a program running in the background that could be interfering with your surfing. HTH!

Cheers,

Krunch

All answers received were very pertinent to my problem and although I tried to follow all suggestions I still found the problem remained. But it occured to me that perhaps there was something wrong with my settings for getting on line. Called my DSLasp and reset the internet access and the problem was solved. Thanks for all the help.

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