Win7 32bit laptop takes ~1 minute naps (spinning cursor)

[Muse]

This happens with this Windows 7 32bit Home Premium Lenovo Thinkpad T60 with 3GB of RAM. I don't know that it has anything to do with the programs I've opened. I'll get a spinning cursor out of nowhere and nothing responds. My m.o. has been to press ctrl-alt-delete and wait for the blue screen to offer me Task Manager, etc. and then hit Cancel. If I don't do that (the monitor changes to dark blue suddenly) I don't know when the machine comes back to life.

How can I trouble shoot this? I have a backup from ~6 months ago I could go back to but wonder if there's a better way to solve this. I've run Superantispyware on the machine, malwarebytes too. The machine runs MSE. msconfig shows a lot of stuff running, I have no idea what I should remove from startup or erase from services.

This has been going on for over a month, this is my main machine, I use it many times a day, putting it into suspend between uses.

Thanks for help.

 

[xSauronx]

id check the event viewer in the applications and system log to see if any app or hardware is causing an issue

you could also check task manager first to see if something is showing high CPU usage.

 

[Ketchup]

Programs and features may show you a program that was installed recently, causing the problems.
If you Google the items in msconfig, you should be able to get a good idea as to their necessity.
Next time you do ctrl/alt/del look at the cpu and memory usages and see if they are abnormally high.

 

[Muse]

Whoops, looks like I'm hosed ATM. I couldn't get my smartphone (Nokia 520 Windows Phone) seen in Explorer, so logged off/on. Windows Update said it had updates and since I had nothing running decided to let WU do its thing, allowing 11 important updates to install and a couple of optional ones that seemed a good idea. Windows failed to start properly when I tried to restart after the updates had installed (Windows prompted me to restart). Allowing Windows to try to repair the OS failed in the repair (Windows said so). I attempted to go back to a restore point, the oldest being from April 3, and Windows again reported that it wouldn't work.

At this point I don't know what I can do to repair it. Ideas?

I'm going to look in my data on the network and see if I made notes concerning backup(s) of the machine, I recall making at least one, don't know where I put it, hopefully it will say. It might be on the D drive of the machine, I have its SSD partitioned into C and D. Or, it might be on an external USB drive. Are there any other options? Any backups are very old, over a year... Thanks for help!

 

[Ketchup]

So the first thing I would do is pull the drive and see if another machine can grab what's important to you.

Put the drive back in and see if a fresh install will go through.

 

[Muse]

So the first thing I would do is pull the drive and see if another machine can grab what's important to you.

Put the drive back in and see if a fresh install will go through.

I don't think there's anything of importance on the OS partition of the SSD drive. Its second partition has some data it would be nice to retain, but AFAIK there's nothing crucial on that second partition. I figure the thing to do is to restore to one of 3 possible backups I made of the OS partition. I made another thread about this here:

Restoring Acronis image of OS

I don't want to do a fresh install unless I need to due to the major inconvenience of having to do all the Windows Updates, the system updates for Lenovo, application/utility installs and configurations, a major PITA. My backups have most of that done. I just don't know right now if the last two backups are of that machine. I have several machines and I stupidly failed to identify what two of the backups are from.

 

[John Connor]

Sometimes a repair install could work. If the machine doesn't boot try safe mode. http://www.pcworld.com/article/243190/how_to_repair_a_corrupt_windows_7_installation.html

 

[Muse]

Sometimes a repair install could work. If the machine doesn't boot try safe mode. http://www.pcworld.com/article/243190/how_to_repair_a_corrupt_windows_7_installation.html

It's booted right now, in suspend. Windows Update tells me it wants to do its thing. AFAIK, it will screw up the machine again for whatever reason and I'll be in pretty much the same leaky boat.

I think what I'll do is try to ascertain if the 2nd backup (from May 2014) is of that machine, and if so, restore that to the machine's SSD (by putting that SSD in my 2.5" HD enclosure and attaching that to my desktop and running Acronis WD edition). That backup should have the great majority of my programs installed. There will be some work, including Windows Updates to do, but I figure chances are good that those updates (including the current ones, of course) won't fail and the machine won't exhibit the nasty behavior that it's had the last month or two of taking ~1 minute naps several times a day! 😵

 

[hhhd1]

open performance montior and check disk usage during that nap time

It happened to me, and it was the SSD having a read error

 

[Muse]

open performance montior and check disk usage during that nap time

It happened to me, and it was the SSD having a read error

How can I do this? I'm almost 1/2 way into this video: Windows 7 Performance Monitor and what the obviously very smart guy (with excellent English and communications skills) is explaining is rather complex and I have no idea how I can use Performance Monitor to suss out what's going on with the machine.

In actuality, since restoring to the April 7, 2015 restore point I haven't had this happen. However, I expect it will. Or quite possibly Windows Update will again fail to install the latest updates properly and I will again be looking at going back to my May 2014 image of the machine.

 

[sm625]

My computer used to do this. I disabled the AMD external events service to fix it. I doubt you have that service running but it could be something similar. You jsut have to start killing programs and services until you find the culprit.

 

[Muse]

My computer used to do this. I disabled the AMD external events service to fix it. I doubt you have that service running but it could be something similar. You jsut have to start killing programs and services until you find the culprit.

Yes, I think that's a good idea. If it keeps happening, I'll do that. That's assuming I can even do Windows Updates at this point, as I say. I'm monitoring the situation. Today, however, I experienced no problems I can recall with the machine. The acid test will be the Windows Updates. If I can't do those I figure it's time to restore from my May 2014 backup.

 

[cubby1223]

Long pauses, in my experience, are either (1) a failing hard drive, (2) a failing cdrom drive (check event viewer), or (3) a directory somewhere on the hard drive that got overloaded with tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of files (often from a virus).