Win7 Desktop hangs every 3 sec

[progrox]

I booted up this morning, POST was fine, Windows 7 booted up with the usual quickness and then bam. Everything turns slow as soon as I reach the desktop. The PC hangs in intervals of 3 seconds, then follows a brief period of normal responsiveness (I hear the PC "working" very shortly with the start of every responsive period, but opening programs was still a pain and took forever). The Task Manager says that the CPU is free, around 0-5% from my other programs. I hit the reset button on the case, boot is quick, then desktop is sluggish again. Then I hit "Reboot" and the same thing.. everything is slow. While I am trying to investigate, and open up Control Panel and my browser.. suddenly everything is back to normal, and that is where I am now.

My first thought was virus or trojan, but I'm fairly sure that Avira would've said something. Second thought is any kind of hardware defect. This point is moot considering the PC boots fine, and fast every time. Slowdown occured only after reaching the Desktop. I actually had an issue like this on my old PC once, but I can't recall what caused it or how I fixed it (or if it went away by itself too).

So should I write t

 

[mpilchfamily]

Please list your system specs. This may help narrow down the problem. Also verify that everything is showing up as it should. That all the RAM is showwing, the HDDs are registered correctly and so on. Just check everything in the device manager. You may have a driver problem or some other conflict. that is slowing things down.

 

[progrox]

Asus P5Q Pro
Corsair 4 GB DDR2-800
C2Q Q9550, 2,83 GHz @ 1,1V
Leadtek GTX 275
Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic
2x WD5000AAKS 500 Gb
LG GH22NS40 DVD

I wasn't able to check while my PC was slowed down, but right now I don't see anything missing or displayed as not working. The undervolt on the CPU aside, everything is running stock. And I've run Prime95, Furmark and Memtest86+ in the past without problems.

 

[mpilchfamily]

Well undervolting the CPU could be causeing stabilty issues and slowing the system down. Take it back to stock. If you still have problems we can go from there.

 

[progrox]

I just had the same thing happen again.

- It always happens when I turn on the computer and Windows 7 loads to begin with. It doesn't just pop up when the PC started out working fine.
- Only happens using Win 7
- I rebooted and set voltage to stock, the problem still persisted.
- Again, it got a little better over the course of 10 minutes and then suddenly went away entirely.

I've got a hunch that hardware has nothing to do with this at all. My gut feeling says this is either some kind of Windows service, a trojan/virus that Avira is unable to find (unlikely), or some other bad piece of software, most likely to do with the OS itself.

 

[KGB]

As an experiment, try unplugging your network cable / internet access and then start it up.

It sounds like the OS or some program is updating and that's the slowdown you observe.

 

[wgoldfarb]

This may make no sense at all, but I know that Win 7 loads some services in delayed mode. You mention the problem seems to go away after a few minutes. Perhaps a service is set to load in delayed mode (when it would need to load at startup)? Once the service loads, the problem disappears. I don't know what happens if a delayed mode service is needed by the OS before it has loaded. Is it loaded immediately?

Check which services are being loaded in delayed mode, or even services set to manual, and see if any of them might be causing trouble.

 

[Jeffman]

It's almost got to be a Windows service or a driver. If it was hardware then you'd see problems outside of Windows as well. How does the system run is safe mode??