I'm mostly wondering about the mechanism behind how some webpages can cause my computer to almost freeze. This happened a couple of times to me in either Firefox or Chrome (the only two browsers I really use). I suspect the root cause is usually Flash though. Here are the specs on my computer:
Windows 7 x64
i7 920 overclocked to 3.8ghz
6gb of RAM
300gb VelociRaptor system drive
Radeon 4850
Whenever my computer semi-freezes when opening a web page, alt-ctrl-del still works but I can't get task manager to open. I get out of the situation by clicking the tab's close button over and over again until it closes or Chrome pops up a dialog which says that a plug-in has stopped responding and asks me whether I want to terminate it.
So I'm wondering, what could be going on in the background when this happens? Is the browser somehow tying up all 4 cores? (Seems unlikely because I've tried running 8 threads of Prime95, played a Blu-Ray movie, and played Dragon Age all at the same time with no noticeable slowdown) It can't be a disk IO issue because the HD is always idle the whole time. What else could it be?