I've been trying to pin down this problem for months now, and I can't tell if it's getting worse or I'm just getting more frustrated with it. Every once in a while, for no apparent reason, my computer will just stop responding, and any audio or video will pause, for 5 to 10 seconds while the hard drive whirs noisily. By not responding, I mean the cursor does not respond to the mouse, and keyboard entries are remembered but not acted on until the 10 seconds are up. It has made watching video files an exercise in waiting for the inevitable. It (or something similar? not sure) happens very often when using Firefox with several tabs open - haven't yet tried other browsers to compare.
Interestingly, while video files (on system hdd or others) simply pause 10 seconds, and continue afterword as if nothing had happened (sometimes with temporary artifacts), a DVD will pause, then spend an additional 10 seconds playing the video first at maybe 2x speed, then switch to 0.5x speed, and finally back to 1x.
Memory usage almost never goes over 50%. Hard drive is less than half full. I have updated everything I can think of, including the hard drive's firmware. The problem persists in safe mode. There are no correlating events in Event Viewer. I've tried to use Performance Monitor and Process Monitor to track down whether there's any particular process that's causing it, but no luck so far. It doesn't appear to be reading or writing anything to disk during this time, but the %Idle in Performance Monitor drops to 0, while the current queue creeps up, and then there's a burst of reading and writing in the last second. I've run the Seagate's SeaTools hard drive tests, and they come up clean. Same for Windows memory test.
I knew when I bought this machine that it wouldn't be blazing fast, but I didn't expect performance like this. Am I running into some kind of hardware problem? Or is there some problem with my Windows 7 installation or settings that is causing this?
Interestingly, while video files (on system hdd or others) simply pause 10 seconds, and continue afterword as if nothing had happened (sometimes with temporary artifacts), a DVD will pause, then spend an additional 10 seconds playing the video first at maybe 2x speed, then switch to 0.5x speed, and finally back to 1x.
Memory usage almost never goes over 50%. Hard drive is less than half full. I have updated everything I can think of, including the hard drive's firmware. The problem persists in safe mode. There are no correlating events in Event Viewer. I've tried to use Performance Monitor and Process Monitor to track down whether there's any particular process that's causing it, but no luck so far. It doesn't appear to be reading or writing anything to disk during this time, but the %Idle in Performance Monitor drops to 0, while the current queue creeps up, and then there's a burst of reading and writing in the last second. I've run the Seagate's SeaTools hard drive tests, and they come up clean. Same for Windows memory test.
I knew when I bought this machine that it wouldn't be blazing fast, but I didn't expect performance like this. Am I running into some kind of hardware problem? Or is there some problem with my Windows 7 installation or settings that is causing this?
My Computer
- OS
- Windows 7 Professional x64
- CPU
- Athlon II X4 630 2.8 GHz
- Motherboard
- MSI 785gtm-e45
- Memory
- 4 gb
- Graphics Card(s)
- XFX Radeon HD 4650
- Hard Drives
- Seagate Barricuda 7200.12 750gb
