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#1
Intermittent hanging with no CPU usage but 100% HDD
This has been a very frustrating ongoing problem i have been trying to solve for almost a month now, and i am just about ready to give up and switch back to Vista.
The problem:
About a month ago, i noticed firefox would hang intermittently while browsing. Maybe once every half an hour or so for maybe 20-30 seconds. It would generally occur when browsing pages with lots of images, or pages i was visiting for the first time (ie: nothing cached).
Nothing else would hang (i could play new release games on max settings, use photoshop all day long, etc.). After a week or so, the problem got to the point where it was getting pretty frustrating (ie: freezing up every few minutes... sometimes for up to 5 minutes), so i figured firefox was at fault and i tried internet explorer. Same problem (at this point the problem was still localized to web browsing). I then downloaded google chrome. Still same problem.
Shorty after, the problem spread to the rest of the system, worst when web browsing, or using explorer to browse folders.
Now, the system is pretty well unusable. It hangs once every couple minutes (sometimes it will get on a roll and go 5 minutes without issue)... sometimes it freezes up for up to 10 minutes.
The system never "crashes" or hits a blue screen. Nor does the event viewer pick anything up.
When the system hangs, processor sits idle, memory usage stays the same. The only indicator is hard drive active time jumps to 100%, hard drive response times jump to over 3000ms, and hard drive transfer rate slows to a crawl (under 1mb/s).
During the hangs, mouse stays responsive, but as soon as i click anything in any program, that program goes unresponsive.
What i have tried:
- Boot into seperate vista install. Problem is not present in Vista (vista is on a seperate hard drive)
- Install and run Kaspersky Antivirus, both from windows 7, and also scanning the win7 drive while booted into vista. Nothing.
- Do an overnight ram test
- test hard drives (have checked the drive with chkdsk, as well as a third party tool, run from vista). Hard drives all report OK with normal response times and no slow downs
- Physically swap SATA interfaces, cables, power cables, physical drive locations with the Vista drive)
- uninstalling/ rolling back/ updates SATA drivers in win7
- updating all drivers
- safe mode (problem still exists)
- messing with every possible bios setting
At this point i am at an utter loss as to what to do. All my programs/settings are in windows 7 and i really would prefer to continue with 7 rather than roll back to an older O/S or reinstall (only to possibly encounter the same issue... i've had windows 7 for less than 2 months so the install is pretty fresh). I am out of ideas. I have searched for this problem extensively online, and tried all suggestions i found. I cannot figure this out.
Some quick, possibly relevant, backstory: When i first installed windows 7, the system was slow, and randomly had hang-ups and slow disk transfer rate, sort of like it does now. I solved it initially by installed all the chipset drivers.