I'm working on an Acer Aspire One D257 running Ubuntu 11.10, and every few minutes the laptop freezes up for a second or two, before becoming responsive again.

This doesn't really present a huge problem, but when I'm trying to code all of a sudden vim stops responding for a couple seconds while I'm trying to modify my code, it's increasingly frustrating. The odd part is, if I play a movie in VLC at the same time, when vim pauses the video keeps playing just fine (VLC's priority is not modified).

I'm wondering if anyone knows why this may be happening, or in lieu of that, how I might be able to track down the source of my frustrating pauses. Normally I would try using top, but the pauses are shorter than 2 seconds so nothing unusual shows up in top as consuming the CPU.

Does anyone know how to troubleshoot intermittent repeating 1 second long pauses in vim?