computer freezing and then catching up..

pwd

The hard disc of my computer was replaced after it gave read and seek errors. I think the motherboard was also replaced.
I cloned the drive onto the new one.
Now it freezes for 30s-2m at a time, and then goes very fast. For example, it will freeze during a movie for a minute, and then play a minute of the movie in a couple of seconds.
Also the new disc makes a kind of rattling noise; not the same as a head skipping when it is broken, but strange.
I ran chkdsk andd there was no problem. I ran the dell diagnostics at bootup and there was no problem.
It can happen several times in an hour one time, or not at all the next time it is turned on.
I think it is probably a software problem, or something installed causing issues, or corruption in the disc image thanks to the errors with the disc. However I'm not sure.

Does anyone recognise this sort of thing, or know what it is?

CreepingDeath

Maybe it's heavily defragmented.
You could try defragmenting the drive(s).

How many hard disks do you have ?
How much space is on the C: drive ?
It could be that the C: drive is full and Windows can't allocate enough Virtual memory.

If you have a larger / empty drive, you can move the windows virtual memory/swap space to there instead.

If you believe there's error on the drive you can download the free version of HDTune here.
There's a health tab in the HDTune window, and you can see if there's any problems.

Look at the following particularly
(01) Raw Read Error Rate
(07) Seek Error Rate
(C8) Write Error Rate

pwd

CreepingDeath wrote: »

Maybe it's heavily defragmented.
You could try defragmenting the drive(s).

How many hard disks do you have ?
How much space is on the C: drive ?
It could be that the C: drive is full and Windows can't allocate enough Virtual memory.

If you have a larger / empty drive, you can move the windows virtual memory/swap space to there instead.

If you believe there's error on the drive you can download the free version of HDTune here.
There's a health tab in the HDTune window, and you can see if there's any problems.

Look at the following particularly
(01) Raw Read Error Rate
(07) Seek Error Rate
(C8) Write Error Rate

There's about 16GB of free space. It has 4GB of RAM, and it is freezing during tasks that don't require much, such as playing a movie, or using the internet.
It is only 2% fragmented.

CreepingDeath

I've a couple of theories, but nothing spring out as obvious

1. you may have a virus scanner/malware scanner that periodically scans your system and slows down your machine

2. other non-essential programs like Google Desktop and the Windows indexing system can scan your hard disk on a regular basis, slowing down disk intensive processes like viewing movies

3. The computer system fan might be failing, and the CPU is overheating. Although that would cause a systemwide freeze, where everything pauses until the CPU cools down.

4. Have you gone into the device manager and checked if there's any warnings for unrecognised devices ?

5. If you installed the hard disk yourself, and it's an IDE disk, as opposed to SATA, and you've multiple drives off the one IDE cable then it's possible that they're not configured right. Ie. one should be the master and the other is the slave. If you've only one IDE drive on the IDE cable, it should be configured as the master.

ressem

Is this a laptop or desktop?
OS version?
Is the movie from DVD, hard drive or internet? (could be a codec issue if from the net or hdd)

After cloning it helps to run a thorough checkdisk and defrag, preferably with the drive still connected as an external drive to a modern windows vista/7 pc, so it can reorganise the drive sectors / file table that may have been shuffled due to corrupt blocks on the old drive.

A light 'chk'ing noise isn't unusual with modern drives. As long as it's not excessive at freezing time.

Any chance of leaving 'resource monitor' from task manager open on the disk tab for an evening to see whether there is a sign of any process kicking in and hogging the disk?

pwd

Thanks for the replies so far.

No software changes after the disc was replaced.
No unrecognised devices.
No disc fragmentation.
Hardware diagnostics showed no errors, after scanning whole disc and many other hardware tests.
It does seem to be running hotter in general, but it is lagging when it is not hot/ not doing anything resource-intensive. Familiar with overheating issues with this machine [not an issue at this time], and this is different.
Monitoring resources indicates a dip, rather than a spike, in processor usage when it happens. Not sure if there is a change in disc access levels yet, or network traffic.
Laptop running windows 7.
It doesn't only happen during movies - this was just a convenient way of illustrating what is happening. It's not a codec thing.
Virus scanner is avira which is light, and only runs once a week automatically. Have used it for years on the same computer without issue.
It's a SATA disc and it was installed by a dell technician.

pwd

I think this was being caused by dvd imaging software I had installed right before I cloned the disc, which seems to cause problems under Windows 7. This was non-obvious because it wasn't only happening while the software was in use. I removed it with revo uninstaller, which scans for registry settings etc that are not removed by the uninstaller. Hopefully this issue will stop happening now [so far so good].
Thanks for the suggestions.

pwd

didn't fix it; still happening.

pwd

reinstalled windows. still happening. hardware problem then.

softdancomputer

I will say is something wrong with the HD, take it back to the repair shop as it should be under warranty.

pwd

Motherboard replaced again. Apparently they use repaired ones, rather than new, when replacing them. Jingly sound from hdd has stopped. Problem still occurring; only been copying/moving files.
I switched to "high performance" mode in power options. I suspect there is some malfunction where the processor is turning off inappropriately, and if this seems to fix it that would support that idea.
The processor is not overheating. I had software installed to monitor this and it wasn't going over 65 degrees [generally running 40-50]. However, the part of the computer where the wireless card is seems to be very hot.

edit: Switching it to high performance in power options seems to have prevented the issue from recurring. Use 100% processor minimum while plugged in.