Unusual freezes and slowdowns

[IronSoldier]

I have been experiencing unusual freezes for the last couple of months. Most of the time, the computer runs fast and smooth, but randomly, it freezes for a 30s-2min interval. It is extremely frustrating and confusing. It is not your usual freeze or a slowdown. It happens when I am running performance taxing processes such as video games, but also when I'm on Google Chrome (or whatever browser) or simply browsing folders looking for something. And the freezes are weird, I can still move my mouse cursor, but everything else is unresponsive. I can't turn on the task manager either, it shows up only after the slowdown is over. In StarCraft 2, the game runs fine (except for the suspiciously long loading times), until the freeze occurs, then the sound starts looping and I can only move my mouse cursor. In Skyrim, the game runs perfectly fine (settings maxed), but suddenly, sounds stop playing and the game freezes until it manages to load the sounds. Weird and hard to describe.

I have tried everything: reinstalling windows, taking out the RAM sticks to see if one of them is faulty, setting RAM latencies, updating every possible driver, taking out the 1,5 TB HDD out... the hotfix and SP1 didn't work either.

It is quite frustrating, thanks in advance to everyone who tries to help.

 

[solarmystic]

Hello and welcome to the forums Ironsoldier...

Have you considered running through the rather in depth tutorial for Windows 7 below?

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/220165-troubleshooting-steps-windows-7-a.html

Try running through each step and offer us feedback for completeness...

(some steps may be redundant, or ones you have completed before, but please run them anyway for our diagnostic purposes)

From your preliminary statement however, I'm leaning towards some form of potential primary hardware/harddrive failure/or your power supply.. Go ahead with those steps though, so we can work through this systematically..

EDIT:- Is your system overclocked in any way, shape or form? Disable any form of overclocking before running through the steps...

Could you also add your PSU and its specs to your system specs section?

 

[IronSoldier]

Currently running the Malwarebytes' Anti Malware scan. I'll try to get the PSU data, but I highly doubt it is the source of the problem.

EDIT: It is either LC POWER Silent Giant Series - Green Power Edition 560W or 650 W... I'd have to take the whole PC apart to find out which one.

 

[anandntvm]

Some plugins such as Adobe Flash cause these kind of problems. Disable all plugins and then check.

 

[IronSoldier]

Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7:

Step 1: Done. 1 Trojan detected. Unrelated to the problem.

Step 2: Didn't help.

Step 3: Didn't try, but I think the PC would be consistently slow if it was for a performance drag. It definately wouldn't be a problem after a fresh windows install I did.

Step 4: I don't get any errors, crashes or anything, so no.

Step 5: Attached report. View attachment report.zip

Step 6: I haven't been experiencing errors.

Step 7: When the slowdowns occur, none of the programs such as task manager work properly anyway, so it is pointless I guess. The computer "acts" like nothing had happened after the slowdown is over.

Step 8: Tested with memtest overnight. No errors.

Step 9: I don't see how it helps, I just recently formated all but two partitions (two minor, mostly unused partitions) and defragmented them.

Step 10: Doesn't help.

Step 11: Temps are high as it is summer, but nothing unreasonable.

Step 12: The device drivers are always automatically downloaded.

Step 13: Done that.

Step 14: Did a clear reinstall anyway.

Step 15: I'll edit the post and add the results later. EDIT: No integrity violations found.

Step 16, 17: The OS is 2 days old. I don't think there is a need for that.

At last, I don't think it is a PSU issue. My HD 5870 is quite a power hungry card and the slowdowns can occur even if the load on the card is 0%. I don't think it is Adobe Flash as it would've occured since the day I purchased the computer and as it happens even while I am not using anything associated with it.