Computer randomly freezing, running choppy, and making weird noises.

[fatstriper]

My computer will occasionally do weird stuff. Sometimes it will just run slow for a little bit. Other times it will freeze with a black screen and then everything becomes unresponsive. Other times it will make strange noises that I can hear though the speakers. The mouse will stutter.

The computer isn't top of the line but it shouldn't be running sluggish. It never used to run like this. I built it last winter. It is a small form factor build and has only a 200 watt pico-PSU. I have a power meter so I don't think it's a power problem but it could be. Also, I overclocked the GPU portion of my chip a bit and increased the base clock to 102. I'm about to lower all of that.

I did a virus scan and spybot, nothing came up.

I have a seagate hard drive. The first two I had failed on me and I had to send them back. I about to run a check on the drive. Any thoughts on data corruption or failing hard drives.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks

 

[MilesAhead]

If the HD keeps failing you could have cooling issues. One of the HW gurus would have more specific ideas I think.

Edit: But especially where you say it's a small form factor I'm thinking the ventilation may not be sufficient.

 

[Mark Phelps]

I have a seagate hard drive. The first two I had failed on me and I had to send them back. I about to run a check on the drive. Any thoughts on data corruption or failing hard drives.

I used to swear by Seagate but lately, I've had high failure rates -- so now, I avoid them. I also had WD "green " drives fail often. But recently, WD has been offering other types of drives and those seem to work well.

 

[fatstriper]

If the HD keeps failing you could have cooling issues. One of the HW gurus would have more specific ideas I think.

Edit: But especially where you say it's a small form factor I'm thinking the ventilation may not be sufficient.

That is possible. To make things more confusing my UEFI does not give me an accurate temperature reading. The bios has a bug in it. I already called the manufacturer and AMD. Every program gives me a different reading. Just putting my hand next to it, it doesn't feel warm. I did have a problem before though where the bios kept turning my cpu fan off. The computer got really really hot and shut down twice before I realized what was happening. I fixed it by setting the fan to 100% all the time. Another bios bug. It could be a heat issue though or it's possible something was damaged when it got that hot. My instinct tells me it's a software issue though.

Yeah seagate gave me a few headaches. I swapped out two of the hybrid drives because I was having serious problems. That was on a different computer though. I ended up settling on swapping it for a 750GB standard drive. I use it in this computer now for storage. I wouldn't buy another Seagate drive ever.

So I just reinstalled my catalyst driver because it was a beta version before. Removed the overclock. Also, I updated my adobe flash. The computer usually crashes when using chrome. Ever since I updated the flash the internet speed has slowed to a crawl. Speedtest is telling me 6mbps. It's weird though because the upload speed is normal. It consistently stays at these speeds. I think that it could be a flash problem. I had this issue before but I did a system restore and it went away. I thought it was a Windows update bug. Any thoughts.

 

[gregrocker]

Test your HD with Downloads | Seagate.

Work through the other http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/220165-troubleshooting-steps-windows-7-a.html to go over and optimize your install thoroughly.

 

[fatstriper]

Test your HD with Downloads | Seagate.

Work through the other http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/220165-troubleshooting-steps-windows-7-a.html to go over and optimize your install thoroughly.

I already did most of those things but I will check out the event log. It just crashed on me.

I'll also try going into msconfig and disable flash and see if that changes anything.

Seagates software said the drive was okay. I use a crucial SSD for my C drive.

 

[gregrocker]

You'd want to upgrade Flash to latest or uninstall and reinstall in Programs and Features.

It shows how to establish a Clean Boot in Steps, with only AV starting with Windows

Try free lightweight MSE to check the difference.

The steps normally identify the problem except when they are resisted. The skipped step is the fix in most tough cases. Those steps compile what works best in tens of thousands of cases which have made this the top tech forums in web history.

 

[fatstriper]

I've been busy and I haven't had time to try and fix this computer but I found two flash plugins in my chrome browser today. I disabled one so hopefully that is responsible for the constant crashing. Has anyone ever experienced this before? I almost did a complete reinstall of windows.

I'm still having issues getting a good internet connection. I'm starting to think that it could be interference. It was working fine but now... I reset everything multiple times. I tried all the channels and auto. Other computers in the house are getting much higher speeds. The signal is at 100mbps connecteded to the modem. Up in my bedroom it is at 1mbps. I've pretty much tried everything but switching out the antenna.

Any advice?