Weird PC pauses

Wearingglasses

So every three minutes or so, the PC freezes for a couple of secs. Avast! doesn't report any viruses or trojans of the sort, though. This is a pretty recent development, and I cannot remember of any changes I did before this started. My memory is at 1 gig, and my hard drives aren't any close to filling. Any ideas?

thej3w

Could be the hard drive or just the windows install. I've had that happen and it was a bad hard drive. Check out tools like HD Life and run it and see what it says.

stigweard

What is your pf usage when this happens? It is under task manager, performance tab, in the middle left.

PatboyX

i had a problem like this.
not sure if this is it or not:

http://winhlp.com/WxDMA.htm

that's not the site i went to find my fix but thats the first one that came up. Ultra DMA v. PIO should provide other info.

Wearingglasses

Thanks for the suggestions, guys Here are the preliminary results:

I have tried the trial version of HDDLife, and it says that the hard disk's fine.
Currently the Page Fault Usage is steady at 330 MB.
I shall look into the DMA -> POI later.
I have also had Spybot do a clean sweep of the system, but the few removed spyware didn't solve the stuttering.
I am currently defragging the drive where Windows is installed, as it has 1.4 gigs left free. It's been that way for a long time, though, so I'm not sure this will help any.

I am still open for more ideas. I'd really like to keep the Windows reinstallation only as a last resort.

drinkinstout

I've had some wierd pausing issues with my PC recently too, usually just after waking it up. It goes on cycles of a 3-5 second pause, then 5 or so seconds of freedom, then repeats... for anywhere between 30 seconds to several minutes.

I sorta figured out what it was but have yet to find the cause.

Download Process Explorer from microsoft and run it when you notice the pausing - see if the Hardware Interrupts line (second one) is peaking during your pauses... if it is, then it's the same problem I have although I haven't personally figured out what is causing it but suspect one of my optical drives.

TetraNitroCubane

I had this kind of problem a few years back. Every few hours, my computer would pause, then snap back into action after four to five seconds. Eventually it would happen at more regular invertals, until every few minutes it was going on. Then my computer would freeze.

This may sound very odd, but in the end it turned out to be a bad network card. I threw the NIC out, used the onboard stuff, and was fine.

Granted, that's probably not the problem you're having, but if the issue persists you might try stripping your rig down to the bare essentials, then building in each piece one at a time. Seriously, it sounds like a pain in the ass, but if you can't figure out the problem it's worth the effort. I can't begin to tell you how much money I spent replacing the PSU, videocard, soundcard, etc. in my machine before I finally figured out it was the NIC.

Fort1tude

Check your CPU temp, my old laptop used to freeze for a couple of seconds every once in awhile and it turned out my processor was frying. Fuck the smartstep 250n.