Computer keeps hanging

[richboyliang]

in these past few days, long, 30-second hangs have been occurring increasingly frequently, with no more than a few seconds between hangs today. It starts out one program not responding at a time, then spreads to all the rest of the programs. Sometimes it's so bad that the computer ignores ctrl-alt-delete. I don't know what's causing it, but it is made more perplexing by the fact that no more than 10% of the i7-2600K cpu is being used at any time, and the programs only use 3-4 GB of 16 RAM.

 

[tivatar]

Have you made any hardware changes or installed any new programs/updates since it started?
Have you ran a virus scanner in safe mode?
Are your systems fans operating normally?
Are you overclocking any of your hardware to a level that could cause instability?

 

[phil22]

Process of elimination is the only answer. Start off by testing the system hard drive with manufacturer's diagnostic software which runs from a bootable CD (testing the system drive from within Windows is not recommended).

You can use "SeaTools for DOS" - click "Download" on this page: http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/

To make a CD from the "SeaTools" ISO file, use IMGBurn from here: http://filehippo.com/download_imgburn/
Boot your PC from that CD and "SeaTools" will eventually open.

 

[noidea_77]

In addition to tivatars questions I would check the disc. Just in case, it might be the last chance to backup your data.

 

[richboyliang]

avast virus scans turn up nothing. fans are fine and nothing was overclocked.
a gtx 550 ti had been installed in my computer for about a month but it was taken out. the nvidia control panel is still installed though. i installed maplestory and roboform but we know what those are.

more problems though. i restart the computer and it says "Loading operating system...a disk read error has occurred. press ctrl-alt-del to restart."

 

[noidea_77]

So it's to late! The disc is gone!

 

[richboyliang]

strangely i inserted the windows cd and it got past the loading operating system part to say windows failed to start and offered to launch startup repair.
After like 20 min, it announced that startup repair had failed. I did a system restore to 2 weeks ago though, and it seemed to solve most of the problems.