Windows 7: Continuous momentary hangs

I am using a latitude E6510 with Windows7 64 bit.

I am getting frequent, random, momentary hangs - 50 or more in an hour.
I can be typing, or searching on the web, or pretty much doing anything, and the machine will hang - the mouse pointer will stop and go to a green circle - or the cursor will stop while I am typing and then several letters will cascade in to catch up. It's most maddening when I am listening to music from a web site and it will jutter or buzz.

I can watch the resource monitor and often the hang will occur when the computer is accessing the disk drive and the cpu usage goes up. The cpu usage isn't that high - a few percent to a few tens of percent - but it will spike, and the hard drive will spike - and I get a hang. I've done a scan using microsoft security essentials - nothing found. I've reduced the programs on my startup menu; I've rebooted. I've looked at Task Manager to see what is most active and don't see anything unusual - csrss and firefox are most active... Nothing I've done seems to affect it, it still randomly hangs.



Other possibly relevant data: I recently loaded identity finder and trucrypt - but see no difference whether they are running or not - and they aren't loaded in the startup menu as far as I can tell so normally I am not running them in the background.

If this thing is getting set to meltdown on me, I'd like to be prepared for it - but otherwise what do I do to get rid of this. (and it's probably hung twenty times while I was typing this)

Thanks for any advice.

have you tryed running chkdsk? if not try it and see what comes up.
you may also went to check your event log and see if it tells you anything.


scrooge

I ran chkdsk as suggested and it went through the process with no obvious problems.
In the event log, I am finding a number (>30) of audit failures - the event ID is 5061 and 5038 - I'm afraid I didn't have much luck identifying what these were - or find answers that were relevant to Windows 7.

Thanks

The security policy setting determines whether the operating system audits events that violate the integrity of the security subsystem, which can include any of the following events:

• Audited events are lost due to a failure of the auditing system.
• 
  A process uses an invalid local procedure call (LPC) port in an attempt to impersonate a client, reply to a client address space, read to a client address space, or write from a client address space.
• 
  A remote procedure call (RPC) integrity violation is detected.
• 
  A code integrity violation with an invalid hash value of an executable file is detected.
• 
  Cryptographic tasks are performed.

Important
Violations of security subsystem integrity are critical and could indicate a potential security attack.

5038 - Code integrity determined that the image hash of a file is not valid. The file could be corrupt due to unauthorized modification or the invalid hash could indicate a potential disk device error.

5061 - Cryptographic operation.


Try running sfc /scannow from an elevated command prompt. Follow that with MBAM. (free)

Hi Carwiz,
Thanks for the suggestions - I did the administrator scan and it was unable to find anything that looked suspicious; I followed that with the Malware scan and it turned up 8 files that it flagged "PUP.Funware...." and I deleted those. But I am still getting pretty much the same story: the hard drive is accessing every few seconds and on the Windows task manager, I see the CPU usage spike to 100% at odd intervals - sometimes I'll get several spikes - one after the other - and then it will run fine with no spikes for several minutes and then start spiking again. On the task manager I have four CPU windows - I assume one for each of the quad-cores - and only two show the large spiking that accompanies the momentary hangs. Sometimes I see the spiking on two, sometimes only on one...

The other notable condition is that the memory shows only about 25% usage - although it is variable. I was thinking that the hard drive was using virtual memory - but with that much open space in the RAM, that doesn't seem to make sense.

I'm afraid that I'm stumped... any other ideas on things I could try?

Thanks

After reading extensively on another forum of similar problems, it was suggested that there was a problem with Adobe Flash Player needing to be reconfigured. Computer dunce that I am, I just uninstalled all the Adobe Flash software and
reinstalled and that seems to have cured this particular problem.

Best of luck to anyone else suffering through this aggravation - this is a simple enough fix that may be worth a try if nothing else helps.