HD spinning is making the computer freeze

[Jean-Rene Cormier]

Hi, I was doing some graphic editing yesterday with The Gimp and from
time to time the HD would start spinning and the computer would freeze
for like 4-5 minutes, I can't do anything during that time, the cursor
doesn't even move, all that's happening is the HD spinning. Last night I
checked how long it took to come back and it took over 10 minutes, the
clock was stuck at 11:51 and when it stopped spinning the clock changed
to 12:03.

What could be causing this? I'm thinking that it's because I don't have
much RAM and it has to use the swap file a lot.

The computer is a Dell Inspiron 300m laptop, with a 1.2GHz CPU, 256MB of
RAM and 40Gb 5400RPM HD.

Here's what top gave me yesterday right after it did it for the last
time yesterday:

Mem:   245948k av,  241596k used,    4352k free,       0k shrd,    3736k
buff
       139152k active,              65000k inactive
Swap:  522104k av,  274964k used,  247140k free                   34336k
cached

Also I noticed that X use an aweful lot of RAM, is this normal? I'm
running KDE btw.

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU
COMMAND
 3750 root      15   0  413M 131M 67704 S     0.5 54.9   5:48   0 X

Jean-Rene Cormier