Hey all,

I've been having weird symptoms with a PC I built for around a couple weeks. As of today, I want to remove them. They are the following:

Severe lag for a couple seconds when opening 'My Computer'
Severe lag for a couple seconds when computer boots up
Severe lag whenever iTunes is open (audio will lag aswell)

As you can probably tell, the problem I think is severe lag. A more thorough description of the situation is that whenever I do one of the above things, I hear my hard drive (which is usually clicking away) stop and start. My mouse and everything on my screen then freezes on and off until the 'seizure' is over. Here are the specs:

MSI P45 Neo-2 Motherboard
XFX Nvidia GTX 285
Intel Quadcore Q9550 @ 2.83 GHz
2 x 2GB Corsair DDR2 RAM
LG Super-Multi Drive GH22
ModX Stream Pro Power Supply 700 Watts
Hitachi 750GB HDD (32MB/s)

I'm running a 64-bit Windows Vista Home Premium SP1

As far as I can tell it's a software issue. After reformatting and installing drivers, the problem exists. Therefore, I think the problem is in one of the drivers. However, I can't tell which. If it helps, my external hardware peripherals that I installed drivers for are:

Razer Diamondback 3G Mouse
Razer Lycosa Keyboard

The first solution I tried was buying a new hard drive. That didn't work, same problem. The reason why I thought it was a hard drive problem was because it happened when I open up 'My Computer' and the audio lagged aswell. The sad part is that there are no error messages in my problem (for the most part). Occasionally on boot up, I'll get a Registry Hive error, whatever that means? If I'm missing any details, please tell me.
Thanks in advance!
Chris

Hello Haxfire! Welcome to PCHF!

We have a fantastic team of techs here as well as a very knowledgeable member community and I am sure we will be able to help you

I will mark your thread as open and someone will be with you as soon as possible, thank you for your patience.

Regards,

Smokeycheech

We need to cut out the guess work and deal with facts if you download filemon or the new version of process mon these will show you exactly whats running and what its doing so it cut out guess work. Run them and watch what happens when you get the lag it may be AV scanning the files

Can do, will update later with the results.

EDIT: Which filter do you recommend I use to sort through which processes are taking up the most memory?

Strangely enough, process mon tells me that iTunes isn't even using half of my cpu when it causes the lag, according to those line graphs generated from the Process Activity Summary. That's weird, cause I've always thought the problem to be there. I'm going to add that I also ran a MemTest overnight, and it found nothing wrong with my RAM. I'm stumped again : \

If your on a shared computer, the User Profile Hive Cleanup Service tool from Microsoft may help you...

Download details: User Profile Hive Cleanup Service

Edit: This tool works in the background so you will not see what it is doing.

What did the filemon etc show you is there a lot of disk writes/reads going on or any large process. You may have to run it a few times to see the problem