I'm running Windows XP and Slackware 10.1 on a system with a 2.16 AMD processor with 512MB of RAM. Every so often under Slackware, the system just seems to pause for 1 or 2, but sometimes more like 5 seconds. After each occurance, and pretty periodically, I type "free" into the terminal to check the memory usage, and everytime it shows about 1/3 of my RAM being used and none of my swap space. If RAM isn't running short, and it nevers writes to the swap, why does my system just periodically freeze? It's not too big of a deal, it never crashes, and within 5 seconds it usually unsticks and continues playing music or running whatever I had up. This type of problem doesn't happen when I run XP on the machine.

Any ideas?

I think I've experienced the same thing with Slackware 10. Often it happens when I use konqueror and try to type in a directory to load manually, but this is no the only time.

Try open a terminal and run the top command
See the top of the process list, what program is here
and how much cpu, memory it uses at this time

after a freeze occurs, you could check the logs for hints on this.

try :

tail -n 100 /var/log/messages

and

tail -n 100 /var/log/syslog

to view the last 100 lines of those files.

egag