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Laptop randomly freezes/lags, can't even finish full antivirus scans
Hello, I'm new on these forums and quite not a tech-savvy person, so I apologize if I sound confusing or the details are missing. I'm on my wits end regarding my 2-year old Lenovo laptop, which has started to get wonky yesterday. The worse thing is that I'm not sure what's the real problem at all I’ll try to detail everything as I remember it, so pardon for the word vomit.
It started when my laptop suddenly froze. I had a bunch of programs open back then (can't remember all of them, but there's Google Chrome with multiple tabs, writemonkey, foobar2000 and a couple of open folders). The cursor changed to 'busy' and for a few moments I let it be. When I noticed it had frozen completely, I tried to move the cursor and it started to lag. Alt-tabbing and ctrl-alt-del won't work, so I went for the power button.
I started it up again and chose to open Windows normally. Everything seemed okay until I realized that the usual startup programs didn't open (Aeria, OpenOffice, etc) and it was lagging. The mouse is working, if I mouse over files on my desktop they seemed to react, but after a while everything just....slows down. I tried opening programs, task manager, even shut down -- nothing. I looked at my laptop's LED lights and everything's all lit up. So power-button again.
This time I went for safe mode and tried to pinpoint the problem. I thought it could be malware so I tried running Malwarebytes. Lo and behold, it...froze. I tried to wait it out but it stayed stuck. I had the idea that maybe the file Malwarebytes was stuck on was the culprit, so I tried to delete it. Turns out I can’t delete the program on safe mode, but opening on normal mode just left me stuck on lag again. Then I remembered that the program was among the ones during normal startup, so I disabled it on safe mode, restarted, continued Windows on normal and finally deleted the thing (it was Evernote). The next time I booted up on normal everything was well. I thought I’ve finally nailed down the culprit.
Nope. Not yet. When I opened Google Chrome, I was greeted with yet another unrecoverable freeze/lag. Same problem on safe mode. I got Firefox and it seemed to be working well, so I thought this was Chrome’s problem. I really liked Chrome, so I uninstalled/reinstalled it, but the freeze/lag still occurred. So I deleted it for good. I ran Microsoft Security Essentials (quick scan) and Malwarebytes quick scan. Nothing turned up. Used Disk Defragmenter too. I thought the laptop’s okay now, but apparently not yet.
Because I just got another freezing episode after several hours of using it. Upon yet another hard reboot I thought of finally running a full scan. The thing is, after several tries, either Malwarebytes or MSE just won’t finish a scan. It will get stuck, and while the laptop will be responsive for a while (mouse moving, MSE tabs giving descriptions upon highlighting, clock still working, etc) it will eventually glitch and be unusable, and I have to resort to a power button shut down.
I’m not sure what’s the problem anymore. Overheating? Malware? Memory leaks? Help will truly be appreciated, I need this laptop working very badly. Thanks in advance.