I wonder if your pausing/freezing might have something to do with power management settings? You can access these in the control panel, it generally has settings for your screen, hard drives and standby, I generally set them all to Never. You could also disable your screen saver, especially if your using a non-Microsoft screen saver (like Webshots or Picasa or something).
Here is a link that should update your chipset drivers: Your computer appears to have an Asus board with an Intel 865 chipset. Here is a driver directly from Intel that should work. Note it is dated 11/21/2006 so is actually fairly recent for the age of your computer. I am assuming you are running XP Home.
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/scri...5&submit=Go%21
You specifically want the INF Update Utility,
8.1.1.1010. filesize 685k