New
#1
Windows 7 freezes completely while CPU usage is almost a flatline
Hello,
This is my first post here, so please relocate it, if it's in the wrong section!
Let me start with the explanation:
Today I resumed my laptop from hibernation (as I usually do) and I was doing the usual stuff I do (skype, browsing, Illustrator etc.) I don't know if it's relevant, but at the last minute I was checking if I can run a game at "can you run it" and then windows suddenly froze still. I waited probably over 5 minutes, to see if it fixes by itself, but nothing happened. I tried to open task manager and kill my browser, as at this time it seemed that this caused the problem. Unfortunately the screen went black and it froze in that state. I switched off the laptop by holding the power button (Something I do quite often as I'm having some issues with my GPU) After Windows loaded completely I continued to do whatever I was doing and 3 minutes after the restart it froze again. Then I noticed that the CPU usage dropped to a flat line with minor peaks to 2-3% (my usual CPU usage constantly varies between 5 and 20%). I restarted 5-6 more times, thus leading me to the same result 2-3 mins after log on. From this you probably understood that my laptop is literally unusable!
After reading every article and thread I found for the past 6 hrs, I came to the conclusion, that my HDD is dying. At one point I was able to run resource monitor before it froze and I noticed that during the "frozen state" the HDD was behaving very strange - the graph for the read/write status looked like an identical pattern of ups and downs, always below 1 MB/s. At this point probably everyone will say that the HD is dying/dead, but what bothers me is the fact that I'm typing this post, while in "safe mode w/ networking" which seams to be working perfectly and without any problems.
I ran check disk and HDTune, and both came "almost" clean. HDtune showed a warning about a possible bad sector, but it's still confusing why I'm not having any trouble on safe mode. I also ran Memory check which showed no faults as well.
I guess it's worth mentioning that after the 10-th retry to run windows normally, safe mode refused to start for some unknown reason, then I did one more disk check and it pushed through! My cousin will send me a new HDD, but this won't happen until the end of next week, and I need my PC on a daily basis, as I'm working with it!
If anyone has any suggestions, besides HDD failure, please share it! I'm literally at a dead end!