Strange system pause while using OS X on Mac mini

My Mac mini has always had a funny little problem. As you are working along, choosing menu commands and pressing buttons, the mini will make a sound like a sigh and stop responding for maybe a second or two. Then all is well and you're back to normal. This seems to happen randomly but regularly (fairly frequently). Any ideas or suggestions you might have would be appreciated. I'm not even quite sure how to phrase the question to search the support files.

Thanks - that information helps, even if only to eliminate a couple of possible causes!
It seems to me to be likely that the noise and pause are related to system activity, thus your observation that it may seem to happen when you 'do something' is likely right. As such it will be interesting to know if MenuMeters shows an unusual rise in paging or CPU load when it occurs, or even if it seems related to network traffic.
There is also a possibility that the symptoms are related to an underlying issue with MacOS on your system, so after following Daddy Paycheck's suggestion regarding checking your hard drive and then checking MenuMeters, I'd suggest a download of YASU (http://jimmitchell.org/projects/yasu/) and after quitting all other applications, setting to run all tasks. YASU is a basic set of utilities for doing routine maintenance on the system, notably repairing permissions (you'll likely have noticed that in Disk Utility as well) and updating Prebinding. Along with this it clears and trims log files and caches. All these are capable of causing symptoms of the sort you describe.
As a precaution, you should backup all your data if you don't already routinely do so. Aside from the possibility that data could be disturbed by running such utilities (rare, but it happens) the symptoms you describe can also reflect the early onset of hard drive failure!

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