Wide World of Women

I have 2 (or 3) occasions where my computer pauses for about 10 seconds before continuing normally.

One is when I start the firefox browser. The system will pause and the power light on the tower stays on for about 10 seconds. After I use the internet for a few minutes it does the same thing.
I know it's only 10 seconds maximum but during this time I can't do anything.

Another time is when I try to save photos after renaming them in photoshop. The system pauses for 5 seconds and then continues with the saving of the photo. This goes on for many pictures.
It seems like what is happening is it is loading up the photos in the folder and won't accept a name change or anything else until all pics in the documents folder have been "opened"

Are there reasons for these pauses? They are minor but it happens every time the events occur.

It could be a lot of things. Check your diagnostics on task manager to make sure you're resources aren't getting used up. Sometimes an external HDD can cause your system to freeze for a few seconds. It may be a fragmented C drive.

After seeing Kev's post, do a defrag if you haven't done one already. A defrag will get file parts joined together closer. It may most likely be that the computer has to stop to join all of the fragmented parts together before proceeding to the next task of loading a program or file. A huge defrag can take HOURS but a partial defrag can work just as well.

On the topic of defragmenting and time, you may want to move as many files to an external as possible. If it's under 100GB it shouldn't take too long to defrag. With really slow machines it may even save time if you move all the files to an external, defrag, then return the files to the original drive.

If not just set it overnight and check it in the morning.

I defragment the hard drive every week.
The system resource says it's taking up 28% during the saving of newly changed photos (and that only is about a 3-5 second pause at most)