Intermittent comp freeze problem

[Emultra]

For quite a while I've been getting regular/occasional ~3 second computer "freeze lags" while playing games. These include such games as WoW (online) and Blood (offline).

I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Delete to see if the CPU usage spiked in any other application while playing. WoW uses 90%+ normally, but as soon as a freeze happened, one of the svchost.exe in the task manager went up to 97% CPU usage for a few seconds or so. This should be the problem, then? I have 4 different svchost.exe and the one that spiked is labelled Network Service.

Any idea as to how to fix it?

 

[mpilchfamily]

First of all disable any background programs that may be using the internet. If you still get the freezing then you'll have to look at other possibilities.

I had similar problems for a while. I then updated my video drivers and that fixed the problem.

 

[Emultra]

I updated the drivers before and it didn't remove the problem. Did fix an fps issue in WoW though.

 

[Emultra]

Bump, problem is still there. I don't know what's causing it. It's neither MSN nor Firefox.

 

[kTriNity]

You can try and check for viruses. I know it's the most common thing you can do to check but hey at least you'll know if do or don't have any viruses.

If the virus scan comes up empty then, I would be guessing that you're CPU might be getting a little hot for it to run smoothly and there for it throttles to try and cool it off.

If you could post your system specs I'll really appreciate it.

 

[Emultra]

I have disabled the DNS Cache found operating within svchost.exe (network service). No CPU lag spikes since.

 

[TemjinGold]

Err... maybe your computer got rooted then?

 

[Emultra]

What should I do about that? I've been using S&D, Ad-aware and AVG.

A Google search yielded some guy who diagnosed the problem as stemming from S&D clogging some list in the DNS cache, and that when restarting it took an inordinate amount of CPU juice.