Aja on 20/4/2011 at 19:23
edit: see latest post for the REAL REASON
What the title says. Just browsing the internet or sorting files, and the system will pause for three or four seconds at a time, during which I can't type or click or anything (usually the mouse still moves). If I have windows open they'll usually switch to "(Not Responding)" until the pause is finished.
quick specs:
Windows 7 64 bit
Core i5 something or other
8GB ram
1TB single HDD
Gigabyte H57M-USB3 motherboard
Radeon 6870
I don't expect anyone to solve the problem based on that info, but can anyone suggest ways of diagnosing this? I've noticed that my HDD light tends to blink rapidly when these pauses occur, but with the Resource Monitor open I'm still not sure what I should be looking for, nothing obviously wrong is accessing the hard drive, at least so far as I can tell...
Al_B on 20/4/2011 at 21:43
Two things occur to me. This is very similar to problems with accessing a network resource (e.g. network drive or printer) that is not available and takes several seconds to time out. Often this can cause Windows Explorer to appear to hang and can cause other programs to also lock up.
However, if its when casually surfing sites then I'd be tempted to try (
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645) Process Monitor to see what's going on while it pauses. It can give you far too much information but if you can find a way to reproduce the problem then it might give you some clues.
R Soul on 20/4/2011 at 22:22
Try checking your scheduled tasks to see if something like disk defragmenter is set to run. It's scheduled by default.
Nameless Voice on 20/4/2011 at 23:15
My guess would be a bad anti-virus which is freezing up your computer while it scans whatever files were just created / modified / accessed for virii.
I remember some encounters with Norton in the past which caused my computer to freeze up every time I saved a large file. Yuck.
Aja on 21/4/2011 at 07:52
Thanks guys. This process monitor is cool, I've had it running and I noticed that some microsoft anti-malware program (MsMpEng.exe) was constantly conflicting with an energy-saver program that came with my motherboard. So I uninstalled that. Not sure if the pausing is fixed yet, but it might be. As the processes scroll down I still notice a lot of NAME NOT FOUND results from various operations; not sure if that's something to be concerned about.
On a side note, I've also noticed that a lot of this Gigabyte software tends to conflict with Windows. Gigabyte's Smart6 program, for instance, was the insidious reason why my Windows Backups continually failed with a seemingly unrelated error code. My advice is to avoid Gigabyte software if you can.
Aja on 6/5/2011 at 04:23
whoops, edited the title and forgot to post. Turns out the hard drive was slowly failing. I'll get a new one under warranty in 4-6 weeks; meantime I bought a new one and everything's speedy again. And whenever the RMA comes back, I'll have two!
