Computer keeps freezing for 10 min, then comes back..

B

Brav

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 12, 2005
Messages
268
I've been going crazy trying to figure it out. Its my Dell XPS Studio 13 running Vista laptop from 2 years ago. The HDD light goes solid, and all programs start freezing. I can still move the mouse around, and sometimes click around, but as soon as I click a program it will stop responding too. Doesnt seem to matter what programs I have open, usually firefox, outlook, skype, quickbooks. I have been using the hardware monitor to see if I can see anything. when the HDD light goes on and things freeze, CPU, network, HD activity goes to nearly zero for the duration. Then magically, 10 minutes later.. its back to normal for about 24 hours. I thought it was Outlook so I archived my old emails and made my eml file smaller.. didnt work. I use MS Security Essentials..

There are about 25 processes running when the homescreen first comes up. Then things are very slow, and another 65 (total 80) show up quite fast, so it seems its hanging on something.. i cant tell what.

What can I do to figure this out?
 
Almost 100% sure that the hard drive is going bad, but it could be that the file system is just messed up and needs to be fixed.

For easy verification, go to Start-->Run or hit thw Windows key and R.

Then type in chkdsk c: /r

It will say it can't lock the drive and asks you if you want to schedule a check for the next boot. Answer (y)es and then do a restart. It should then start a scan before it boots all the way into Windows.

If it finds and fixes file system errors it is probably fine.. but if it either freezes at a place for a long time and/or says it is trying to recover bad sectors then you need to backup your data and replace the hard drive ASAP.

If it doesn't freeze or find any bad sectors do this:

1. Download and run ccleaner from http://www.piriform.com/
2. Defrag your hard drive. The XP and Vista defrag programs are super sucky. Get MyDefrag and do the monthly defrag. http://www.mydefrag.com/

As for the SMART info... if it has any major errors or if something is outside of the limits, then the hard drive is definitely going bad. Different manufacturers use different terms and limits on different drives.

If you have your Dell diag disk handy, you should be able to run a SMART test on the drive. It should tell you if the SMART status is saying if something is wrong.
 
Have u tried ubuntu livecd / usb w/ unetbootin for a period, that should tell us if its hardware or software problem
 
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