Touchpad/ Keyboard Freezing

Monday afternoon I turned my computer on and noticed that every two minutes or so the computer would freeze up for up to 15 seconds, after which I had another one-two minutes of uninterrupted use and then it would freeze again.

The Computer Dell Inspirion Laptop E1705/9400 Windows 7 and Windows xp 40gb and 120gb HDD 1gb ram Dual core (centrino?)cpu need more info? ask.

(only on Windows 7)I'd done two major things in the past week and neither one of them could have had caused this because there'd been so much time in between. The first was I networked a couple folders on my hard drive so they were accessible on the rest of my home network (on Friday). Second I'd installed GIMP on my computer (Saturday night).

(only on Windows 7)I did a restore point from about a week ago, still had the same problem, then I tried uninstalling GIMP and turning off file sharing, still nada.

I thought maybe it was a software problem and because I had a website due in a couple hours I thought I'd swap out the Windows 7 hard drive which I was using and instead use a hard drive with Xp, Oddly enough all the problems I've mentioned up to now and the problems I'll mention persisted on both platforms (unless otherwise stated), also note I hadn't used Xp in months (about 3 months ago was the last time I'd used it in a computer.)

After messing around some more I noticed that my touch pad wasn't working at all (I'd been using a external wireless mouse until then) The drivers somehow uninstalled themselves and pretended to not work when I reinstalled them.

The only thing that kinda worked was booting in safe mode, then the courser would freeze but not anything else. When you look at this with the fact that the touch-pad doesn't work and the problem persists cross-platform, it begins to look like a BIOS or hardware problem, not a software thing.

Other Weird Phenomenon

(only on Windows 7) Stumble Upon doesn't show up in the toolbar even when it's enabled and checked off as supposed to be there, in Firefox.[this one is just weird... it could be that I updated it and didn't realize and it's not playing nice with some other add-on, I'll look into that.) On screen keyboard also wont work in safe mode while courser is frozen (but mouse isn't). When I access files through file sharing from a different computer they are also subject to freezing, meaning that if I have a HTML file open in notepad ++ ( that's on the laptop) every two minutes or so it'll freeze up for 10-15 seconds.