system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why everything else on a computer will freeze and become unresponsive, but you can still move the mouse around.
gpt
Typically when a computer 'freezes' it is due to a specific application misbehaving or running some form of short term resources intensive task and taking up all of the resources that are available for other non-essential applications.

If you think of it like a city, there are priorities on a computer when it comes to resources. in a city things like Schools, Public Safety, and Government are the essential programs that are required to keep the city running. A computer has essential programs too, like input/output, which includes your mouse, keyboard and display.

To continue the analogy, in a city when resources become scarce, as in times of a bad economy or some form of disaster, the essential programs continue when things like State Parks, Historic Building Renovation and Social programs "freeze up". 

It is the same with a computer when an application is using up more resources than the computer has available, all of the necessary things for the computer to operate have resources reserved for them to keep functioning, but the other, non-essential applications all fight for resources.

Many times, if you know how to shut off the application that is hogging the resources, or it completes what ever resource intensive task it was doing, the rest of the non-essential applications will begin to have enough resources to behave normally again.