G+_Roberto Nathan Tobi B Posted January 24, 2015 Share Posted January 24, 2015 I'm coming to the Know How community after exhaustive efforts to find a vile demon that is plaguing my laptop. Any help would be greatly appreciated! I'm having a problem with Windows (8.1) having small freezes randomly, although it seems to happen when handling heavy workloads (games, or alot of flash in chrome, and even loading the Know How page did it a little). The freezing lasts for anywhere from 10 to 60 seconds. Sometimes the mouse also freezes, however when it doesn't it seems to help my system "snap back" to what it was loading by clicking in the explorer bar (task bar). Also, this problem doesn't happen in Linux. Linux Mint 17 runs just fine, even while doing the same things as in Windows. Things my friends and I have tried: -Checking event manager -reinstalling Windows on a different hard drive -Running chkdsk (0 errors, 0 bad sectors) -swapping ram sticks -ram test/benchmark that showed no errors as well Even though I plan on building my own rig soon, I would hate to just throw away a laptop. Any help and/or ideas would be greatly appreciated! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Posted January 24, 2015 Share Posted January 24, 2015 Make/Model? Upgrades? What's running in the system tray? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Roberto Nathan Tobi B Posted January 24, 2015 Author Share Posted January 24, 2015 MSI GX630 The only upgrade is on the hard drive, 320gb 7,200rpm Regular system icons (volume, etc.), and usually the Nvidia utility, and Steam and Origin. It actually happened when I was typing the post. I realized that it was frozen, clicked empty space on the bar and then text that I typed snapped into place. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Jerry Ham Posted January 24, 2015 Share Posted January 24, 2015 I have seen similar issues with several corporate machines (mostly Lenovo since that is what we buy) that have spinning hard drives instead of SSD. If you open up Task Manager and set it to the Process view and just move it to the side a bit and continue working, see if, when it "pauses" on you, if the disk column shows 100 percent (or near 100). If so, it is due to disk throughput limitations (because most of the time when you see this, it will be Windows own processes and can do this even on a completely fresh build from Microsoft source with no other apps). If this is what you are hitting, I don't have a solution for you short of "use SSD with Windows 8 and newer" (and I have the same issue with Windows 10 tech and enterprise previews on older machines like a Lenovo X201 that have spinning drives). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Wayne Black Posted January 24, 2015 Share Posted January 24, 2015 One of the first things that I try when the operating system is "wonky", is Sfc.exe. System File Checker will check all the important system files for corruption and repair them if necessary. Also running Dism.exe, also in an elevated command prompt can sometimes help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Roberto Nathan Tobi B Posted January 24, 2015 Author Share Posted January 24, 2015 Jerry Ham?? I've just booted it up for today, so it may take a minute for the demon to surface lol. I noticed the disk usage last night was very high (in the 90%'s sometimes), but didn't take note of it when the freeze happens. It hit 100% while booting up everything today, but no hiccups. I've got the disk percent in the corner to monitor it now. Wayne Hobbins?? I've got sfc /scannow going now. It's on 3%, so it may need a bit of time lol. Harold Smith?? Yes, and yes. I've also had 7 on here as well. The funny thing is, Win 8.1 had been working fine for some time before this happened. Thanks for the ideas everyone. I'll report back with results after trying these out.? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Roberto Nathan Tobi B Posted January 26, 2015 Author Share Posted January 26, 2015 Do you know when you do a cool trick and then try to show your friends, but somehow you just can't replicate it? Or when your child does something funny, but then won't do it again for other people? Well, it took all day yesterday and today, until just now, for the problem to start again. Here's what set it off today.....the calculator. And it's not even running Unreal Engine 4 or CryEngine 3. Plain windows calculator. It happened when switching from the "metro style" calculator back to my desktop that had chrome opened, the mouse also froze each time. I got an idea from a repost of this post actually. It was to uncheck the hardware acceleration box in chrome, because appearently Win 8 doesn't support hardware acceleration, atleast on chrome I guess. Anyway, chrome performace was immediately better. I had unchecked this halfway through yesterday, and it seemed to help. However, I couldn't be certain that this was the culprit since it was fine the morning before I unchecked it. And now, the problem has occured again, so this can't be it. -I monitored the hard drive usage yesterday. I don't really remember it even getting into the 90's. I ran Steam and Origin, and installed games on both at the same time, and the percent only got up to the 50's or 60's. I was also running multiple chrome windows, including 4k youtube videos. I just pulled up the task manager, and the problem is showing no change in hard drive usage. It's at 0% now, only going up to 1 and 2 (just chrome and calculator running). -I've also had CPUID HWmonitor running, but no abnormal changes in heat are being shown. -I ran sfc.exe /scannow, no errors were found. -I tried booting Spinrite from usb and also inside Linux, but to no avail. I may try again soon though.? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Wayne Black Posted January 26, 2015 Share Posted January 26, 2015 Did you get SpinRite to run from boot? I recently had trouble with it not running and showing an error message after FreeDos ran. I went into the BIOS and changed the hard drive settings from AHCI to IDE or Compatibility mode. Depends on your brand of BIOS. I don't know if it makes a difference, but don't forget to change it back. Laptop in question was running Vista, yeah I said it "Vista"! It was an 8 year old HP! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Roberto Nathan Tobi B Posted January 26, 2015 Author Share Posted January 26, 2015 Nope, after booting to usb, there was just a blinking dos line. Maybe it didn't write to the drive properly, so I may try again soon. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Wayne Black Posted January 26, 2015 Share Posted January 26, 2015 I've always run SpinRite in Windows at first run and used its own program to burn a cd with SpinRite on it. Then boot at restart and SpinRite should begin its magic. When it first boots you should see the "FreeDos" load and a few seconds later SpinRite. When you first run SpinRite in Windows it will ask you to create an iso or img file. Do that and burn iso to a cd. That should create a bootable disc. I've never tried it on a USB. It's been so long I hope this is right! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Roberto Nathan Tobi B Posted January 13, 2016 Author Share Posted January 13, 2016 Not sure if anybody will get a notification of this. But the problem was actually Nvidia drivers. Win 8.1 and 10 were automatically updating to the highest drivers my card would take (142-ish?), but when I would downgrade to a 130 range driver all of the problems would stop. No stutters, fast boot and shut down times. Very strange that a graphics driver would do this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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