You should run palmpsest,gnome-disks, off the CD and unmount, yes. ALthough I believe there are certain limitations depending on the drive and may need to be formatted to do a true test.
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/37659/th ... utilities/There are a lot of bases to cover here, but remember you can also check status via Windows, but..ick.
Other considerations....Ultimate Edition often has a lot going on at startup, it may be beneficial to cut some of this out.
How high are your processes running when this occurs?
Even though you have the requirements Ultimate Edition can be quite heavy, and running multiple applications can definitely sieze everything up. There is weight here in almost every aspect, it is heavy windows, heavy backgrounds, heavy icons, and system crashing special effects.. I love this personally, but it can definitely have side effects. I try to keep in mind that the one building and many of the users have rather high capacity systems.