Try this-worked for me

This freezing could be a sign of an upcoming hard drive crash. How old is the drive? If you run scandisk (full scan - could take a few hours) if the program doesn't freeze while you're running it, it will tell you how many bad sectors you've got on your drive and will move the information that's written on bad sectors to a more stable location. Once a drive starts to go bad, though, there's no stopping it.