Alright, I've lurked around for years solving my own problems, but this time I'm truly stumped. As of late, for multimedia purposes I have been installing and uninstalling programs to which I noticed my PC started slowing down. At some point, I figured it was too slow, often freezing and having multiple programs not respond. In response, I virus scanned/cleared out the registry to no success. So for New Years, I decided to reformat and reinstall Windows (7). After doing so, I find that my PC is still not as fast as it once was, and still often freezes up. After freezing up over a dozen times, and repeatedly opening up the Task Manager, I see that my 'CPU Usage' stays at a solid 0% hardly ever rising. Even though I've never noticed it before I thought it was odd... I'm open to suggestions/upgrade solutions. My specs are as follows; OS:Windows 7 Home Prem. SP1 (legit) Processor: Intel i7 2600K @ 3.40Ghz RAM: 4x2GB Kingston DDR3s Sys Type: 64 Bit Mobo: Gigabyte H67MA-UD2H Casing: Antec Darkfleet 35 Drives; 2x2TB Western Digital Caviar Green(s) Optical; generic LG DVD burner Open to anything really, as long as I can get this working properly again! Thanks to all in advance!
first things first, the CPU is not the only potential cause of slowness, and I think in this case you have more or less eliminated it, unless something is causing it to spike. Other possibilities are your hard disks (they are the slowest part of the system excluding the optical drive) or bus contention somewhere on the motherboard (basically too much data trying to get through a certain point on the motherboard at any one time, resulting in some things having to wait) Random freezing can also be caused by failing components such as ram or PSU. As to where to go from here, I would certainly run memtest86+ for at least 12 hours in order to eliminate bad ram, I would check all your fans are clean and operating normally, I would check all your component temperatures are reasonable, clean any dust out of the case and heatsinks, undo any overclocks you may have applied, and see how things are after that.
Thanks Loony for the quick reply. Yes, I thought it was the hard disks too, which led me to reformat my C Drive. Doesn't look like it did much of a change though. Also attached to my computer other than the two Caviar Greens are 2x 1TB SeaGate external hard drives and also a Iomega 1TB hard drive (I hope this isn't the culprit). I'm not entirely knowledgeable about PCs, so I have no idea yet as to find a solution to if it really is bus contention, but as for overclocking; I've actually never tried. When on Windows, never known how to check CPU temps; I think I'll reboot soon and check it in the BIOS. Right now I'm running the Memtest by loading it via Magic Disc, although now that it's mounted, what happens next? The readme just goes "There is nothing to do here Memtest86+ is located on the bootsector of this CD Just boot from this CD and Memtest86+ will launch"
you have to burn it to a CD and boot from it, it wont run in windows. whether or not the caviar greens are at fault here, they ARE killing your system's performance. 'green' or 'eco' drives are a complete waste of effort because the power savings are minimal and their performance is terrible compared to proper 7200RPM drives. They actually cost more overall because it takes longer to complete tasks, meaning the computer has to be running for longer, completely eclipsing the power savings made by the drives.
Ah thanks, I just looked that up and am burning it now. I suppose that is true, since I was looking more at the value for money for the amount of space (before the floods hit Thailand) at the time, not so sure if it was a good investment anymore even with the current sky high prices. Going to reboot now to check the temperatures (and because Nero told me to after installing). Will keep this thread updated on how things are going. Thanks again Loony! EDIT: Did over 10 hours of Memtesting. No errors, seems like it's not in the memory sector. I think I'll have to keep looking. For now will keep searching, but if I give up at all hope; probably bring it back to the specialist store where I got it for a tune up/check up. Thanks all
