Computer shitting out?

[underscore]

Computer - HP Pavilion dv6000 series

I keep getting these weird spikes of lag on my computer, everything jams up except my mouse, music pauses, can't change windows, nothing. A few seconds to a minute later it's back to normal. I opened up resource monitor and waited for the next one and when it happens, my RAM usage jumps from 44% up to 78%, then dropped down to 34% and the hard faults go from 1-10/sec up to 100+/sec, the disk usage spikes as well. Then the faults slowly roll off and it goes back to normal. It's only been happening the last hour but I've restarted which made it a little better but it's still here, any guesses? I'm worried that since it's the RAM and disk going nuts that my RAM is dying and the disk is having to increase the virtual RAM or something.

I should also note my roommate has been complained about his laptop having massive lag spikes a few days ago, I was gonna reformat it for him tomorrow.

TIA

[ddr]

how 'bout runnin some diagnostics with UBCD, and a full antivirus scan. this can b so many things

[underscore]

what's UBCD?

Fortunately I was lazy and haven't removed 7 yet so I switched over to that, it's definitely not hardware as everything runs fine on 7, and I just did a full scan of the Vista partition with AVG and it came back clean, just some cookies to clear out so I dumped them anyways just in case.