Help with computer hardware?

My computer freezes, kind of... Hardware troubleshooting help please.?

• Every once in a while my computer freezes up completely, even the audio freaks out making an obnoxious "BRRRRRRRR!!" sound. The computer will stay frozen for anywhere from 2 seconds to a minute and then the computer will just come out of it perfectly fine. All I have to do is let the computer sit there and it comes out of it. First I thought it might be related to my video card having a hard time running intense game graphics, but this happens sometimes when I'm not running any games. So now Im thinking maybe its the onboard audio card? Other than that, could it be maybe a bad stick of RAM? My question is how would you troubleshoot this and pin point the malfunctioning piece of hardware? Or maybe its software, or drivers or something.... ughh How to narrow down the problem here? Thanks for the help in advance.

• Answer:

  Try running memtest86, just download it, and burn it to a disc, put the disc in and restart your computer, boot from the disc and it will do its stuff, after an hour or two it will have all of your ram checked and if there is a problem it will tell you what it is, and I believe how to fix it too. What do you have running? You may have a lot of processes running, which take up memory (ram). Do you have iTunes installed? iTunes will have many things run even when you don't have iTunes on, you can close these, just hit CTRL+ALT+DELETE, open up taskmanager, click the "Processes" tab, and close the following processes: Applemobiledevice.exe iTuneshelper.exe iPoddevicehelper.exe (or something like that) myDNSRResponder.exe