I have a rig that is 7 years old. It's got a Seagate 320GB HDD. I've been experiencing a strange freezing up of my system whenever I try to do something intensive such as gaming or watching 1080p videos on it.
The screen just sits there, the mouse moves though, and any audio playing continues to play for at least 20 seconds into the freeze. Then it stops too. The freeze up is for around 1 min approx. Then everything becomes responsive again and starts working like nothing happened. No error messages or codes, no rebooting, nothing. Also the HDD activity light goes off for the duration the freeze takes place. It occasionally makes a sound when it snaps back to working normally.
What could the problem be? I have replaced the SATA cables and it doesn't work either. Is this a problem with the HDD or something else in the system?
Run CrystalDiskInfo to check the health of the hard drive. You could also be infected with malware and viruses. That is one of the most common causes of freezes anymore. Also how much ram do you have?
I have 3GB of DDR2 800Mhz Kingston RAM.
http://s11.postimg.org/6xt0a7mxf/Untitled.png
Windows 7 runs good with 3 Gigs of ram for casual use. So that will lead to either viruses, malware and/or bloatware. Follow this tech tip, and it should help speed your system up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rQjLpR9Ruc
So I just did a low-level(?) format of my drive and re-installed Win 7 on it. It hasn't been having problems at least for now. Will follow your tips.