For a while now, maybe about a month and a half or so, I've been having fairly regular freezing issues on my PC. What basically happens is whilst I'm browsing the internet or just using the PC (chat programs, office) the PC will freeze for about 5 or so seconds. Everything will freeze, including the mouse, and the sound glitches out into a loud repeating buzz. After this freeze, the PC resumes again, but the mouse cursor glitches out, going red/yellow colours and changing into static images (it gets stuck on the hand for example), and the PC will keep doing 3-5 second freezes every 30-60 seconds or so. I've also had it where the PC just dies out completely, it will freeze, but the mouse cursor will still move and power to the keyboard is still given, I just can't click or do anything. This lasts usually for about 10-30 seconds before it just dies off completely and control of mouse is lost and keyboard loses power.
When it first happened I attributed it to flash and youtube, since it only happened whilst I was watching videos. I avoided doing certain things and it was fine, but over time the issue has gotten considerably worse and starts happening pretty much any time. The strange exception is when I'm playing games on Steam. I can play a few games on the max settings with absolutely no drop in performance, and the PC won't crash, even with 3-4 hour sessions. I've never crashed during gameplay, never frozen, nothing, games work and run fine on high settings, great FPS and all that.
The biggest cause of concern right now is my hard drive. I can hear clicking sounds upon bootup (not everytime, but often enough to be worrying) and sometimes on desktop. I downloaded a program to check my HD, and although I have no bad sectors currently, I do have 102 reallocated sectors, up from 98 just last night (4 in half a day basically). This coupled with the clicking, which is the sectors, lead me to believe my hard drive is failing. Around 2 times or so also since the freezing began, I've had bootup fail telling me windows couldn't be loaded, but this was fixed by simply trying again, but still could be a sign of the hard drive failing. That said, could it be the cause of my problem or not? My question is basically, could the HDD be causing these problems? Can I simply get a new HDD and it will be solved? Does anyone have absolutely any other ideas, as I'm pretty stuck at the moment. Here is a list of measures I've already taken in trying to find the problem:
Swapped from Chrome to Firefox, reinstalled Flash, issue still persists (this was due to the original nature of the freeze, whilst on youtube).
Did a RAM memory test, no problems found, also swapped the slots of the sticks, tried with one stick etc, crashes still persisted.
Hard Drive defrag, did a windows hard disk check and again, no issues found.
CPU, GPU and HDD temps are fine during both idle and whilst playing games, the system is not overheating.
All drivers are up to date for GPU, Motherboard, BIOS etc. They have been since the problem started and have remained up to date as new drivers are out.
I did a fresh OS install a few days ago and have had a few freezes since then.
Sorry for the really long post but I wanted to get the measures I've taken out of the way and wanted to be fairly in depth to try and help solve the problem. The PC is self built, my first, I did it about a year and a half ago now and this is the first issue I've had. Thanks in advance.
PC Specs:
Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti
Intel Core i5 2500K CPU
8GB RAM
Z68X-UD3H-B3 Gigabyte Motherboard
Hitachi HDS721010DLE630 1TB Hard Drive
Corsair 600W CX Builder Series 80 PSU
When it first happened I attributed it to flash and youtube, since it only happened whilst I was watching videos. I avoided doing certain things and it was fine, but over time the issue has gotten considerably worse and starts happening pretty much any time. The strange exception is when I'm playing games on Steam. I can play a few games on the max settings with absolutely no drop in performance, and the PC won't crash, even with 3-4 hour sessions. I've never crashed during gameplay, never frozen, nothing, games work and run fine on high settings, great FPS and all that.
The biggest cause of concern right now is my hard drive. I can hear clicking sounds upon bootup (not everytime, but often enough to be worrying) and sometimes on desktop. I downloaded a program to check my HD, and although I have no bad sectors currently, I do have 102 reallocated sectors, up from 98 just last night (4 in half a day basically). This coupled with the clicking, which is the sectors, lead me to believe my hard drive is failing. Around 2 times or so also since the freezing began, I've had bootup fail telling me windows couldn't be loaded, but this was fixed by simply trying again, but still could be a sign of the hard drive failing. That said, could it be the cause of my problem or not? My question is basically, could the HDD be causing these problems? Can I simply get a new HDD and it will be solved? Does anyone have absolutely any other ideas, as I'm pretty stuck at the moment. Here is a list of measures I've already taken in trying to find the problem:
Swapped from Chrome to Firefox, reinstalled Flash, issue still persists (this was due to the original nature of the freeze, whilst on youtube).
Did a RAM memory test, no problems found, also swapped the slots of the sticks, tried with one stick etc, crashes still persisted.
Hard Drive defrag, did a windows hard disk check and again, no issues found.
CPU, GPU and HDD temps are fine during both idle and whilst playing games, the system is not overheating.
All drivers are up to date for GPU, Motherboard, BIOS etc. They have been since the problem started and have remained up to date as new drivers are out.
I did a fresh OS install a few days ago and have had a few freezes since then.
Sorry for the really long post but I wanted to get the measures I've taken out of the way and wanted to be fairly in depth to try and help solve the problem. The PC is self built, my first, I did it about a year and a half ago now and this is the first issue I've had. Thanks in advance.
PC Specs:
Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti
Intel Core i5 2500K CPU
8GB RAM
Z68X-UD3H-B3 Gigabyte Motherboard
Hitachi HDS721010DLE630 1TB Hard Drive
Corsair 600W CX Builder Series 80 PSU
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