Need a bit of help here...

Hey gang, sorry to trouble everybody, but I've been dealing with a problem with Vista since I built my new system, and I am almost at wit's end here.

Here's the problem: My system hangs randomly, with no discernible pattern. I could be playing mp3s (iTunes or WMP, doesn't matter) and suddenly they'll stutter for a half-second, or just hang completely for five to seven seconds. This could happen a minute after I boot, or an hour in. It could happen twice in an hour, or twenty times. I could have five windows open or nothing open other than the player. Or I could be playing a video--either streaming or from the hd, and the same thing happens. Or I could try to open IE while doing nothing else, and have it hang for a few seconds. Or I could be moving my mouse over the start button and have some hang. Or I could be doing nothing and move my mouse and have it be jumpy for a few seconds... you get the point.

The task manager sometimes shows a minimal jump in CPU usage during the hang--from five to seven percent--and sometimes no jump at all--in fact, the system idle process goes up to 100, and whatever other programs I have open (like WMP and the media foundation pipeline) drop to zero. It's as if the computer shuts down for a bit--kind of takes a breather.

Right now I am running next to no software on it, and everything I run has been verified to work on 64-bit vista. I ran memtest86 for five hours last night to see if anything was wrong--no errors. Nothing in the Event Viewer corresponds to the times when the system hangs. In fact, the Event Viewer has been blissfully quiet, save for the odd volsnap issue. There's no temp issues--everything runs steadily between 35 and 49 C. The graphics card runs a little warmer--about 69C, but it's rated for well above that. All the voltages seem fine, and I have plenty of power--1300watts. In short, I have no idea what's going on, or what to do.

Here's what I am running: Intel C2Q Q6700 2.66G, eVGA 780i SLI, 8gigs Mushkin DDRII, x1 nVidia 9800GX2, x2 500g WD SATAII, ThermalTake Armor case, Vista Home Premium x64.

I would really, really appreciate any help or advice or thoughts of the people here. I've never been this stymied by a problem before. And I hope I am in the right forum--I just don't know if this is a hardware issue, a software issue, a general vista issue, or something I just don't know about.

Thanks for your time.

Hi Bglaza,

Welcome to Vista Forums.

This is just a shot in the dark, but you might check to see what you have the Hard disk option set as to turn off after so many minutes in Power Options. If it is set to low, then this can cause the delay you get when the hard drive spins down at set idle minutes and up when you use it next. Normally you should have this set to arround 1 minute before the amount the computer is set to sleep. Step Two in this tutorial will show you how to check and set this if needed.

Power Options and Sleep Mode Problems

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Brink,

I went into the power settings and checked the hard disk. It was scheduled to turn off after twenty minutes, so I upped it to sixty, and set sleep to never. The system still gets the random hangs and catches though. But thanks for the advice--it was worth a try. Oh, and I forgot to mention above that I run nod32 av, and do regular system scans, so the odds that this is some kind of a stealth trojan are pretty slim. So if anyone has any suggestions, I would be very grateful.

Thanks again,

Brad