Laptop Lag Spikes And Graphic Errors.

A

Axeoasis

New Member
Ok guys so i am having a very odd problem. As you know yesterday was Christmas, and my dad got me a laptop i wanted. It's running Windows 7 Professional (x64) with a 2.5 Ghz i5 and 8 GB or RAM (DDR3), so i shouldn't be having the issues i'm having. Out of nowhere, since i first booted it up, it's been having small "hiccups". What i mean is that when i'm on apps, depending on how heavy the program is, i get a small bit of lag for about 1 - 3 seconds. It's odd too because the CPU usage doesn't spike up much (about 1% to 7% when idle, the spikes only go to about 40% at most). It isn't as bad for lighter programs such as internet browsers or skype, but when i'm playing games it's obveyous, and the heavyer the game is the more often it occurs (about 15 seconds in between on minecraft, about 5 seconds for the Sims 4). My CPU usage rarely goes up to 100%, but it isn't normally due to the spikes, just having a ton of programs open. Windows doesn't freeze up either, it's just any apps open pause for a second or two.

My second issue isn't as bad, and is just odd. About 4 or 5 times now my screen has gone completely grey and glitchy (Like small ripples in the screen, you can still read a little but barely, and the right side looks like a missingno for about 2 inches into the screen). Since then i've installed an older graphics driver and haven't had the problem since. When it does it can normally just close the laptop and reopen it and it goes back to normal.

All of my drivers are up to date (except my graphic driver due to the screen issue). I have tried defragging (40% of the HDD was fragmented, now 0%). I have tried making it where windows can't park the cores. Are these two issues related? Could something be wrong with my GPU?

Laptop Model: HP Elitebook 8460p

If you need any more spec info just tell me.
 
What kind of disk activity to you see in Performance Monitor? Mechanical laptop HDDs are a lot slower than their desktop counterparts.

Also, what kind of RAM utilization do you get at this point? Do you close background programs/processes when you game? It sounds like it might be hitting swap a lot.

Also, which i5 is it? Does it also have a discrete GPU or is it using the CPU-integrated one?
 
Memory: The cache faults per sec is jumping from low to high every couple seconds (from about 1 or 4 to about 15 or 19)
Physical Disk: Idle time is commonly 78% to 0%.

As for ram, under physical memory on task manager it is currently 33% (I have chrome, skype, and origins open). During gaming it is commonly 50% to 60% i believe although i am not sure. I have tried closing all other apps but the problems persists.
 
As for the CPU the sticker says Core i5 vPro (i belive it is 2nd generation?) if you'd like i can give you the exact model.
 
Installed titan fall, unfortunately i don't have a video card that can run it :( the hiccups are still occurring on other games though.
 
Ok, so my issues just got worse. Last night i ran a check disk because i was suspecting the HDD for slow response times. I accidentally fell asleep and woke up the next morning to the login screen. I promply typed in the password, but instead of going to my desktop, it just displayed the "Welcome" message and kept the loading rotating symbol. I force restarted the laptop which had a slow boot. Instead of booting, i was met with the two options of starting normally, or trying to repair. I repaired and left the laptop to sit, and after about and hour it had restarted. When it got to the windows 7 logo that says starting windows, it stayed at that for about a full 10 mins before even going to a black screen, which at that point i had to go to work. When i got back about 7 hours later, it had gotten to the login screen. I typed my password in and let it set, at which point it took about 30 mins just to load my desktop, doing so feature by feature (i.e, taskbar, icons, backround). It is literally doing what it did during the "hiccups" before, just at a constant pace now. There is no lag, only things like opening a window or starting task manager take forever to open. My screensaver even still loads, and there is no lag at all with the animation (it's the mistify one). Task manager is also currently open and is even giving me my preformance information. Also, my HDD light is just constantly on. (I don't think i mentioned this before, my dvd drive doesn't work, not sure if this contributes at all to the problem or not).

EDIT: my temps for everything are at normal temps i belive. i have only seen a couple spikes for my gpu as much as 70c, but that is rare and during gaming it is normally about 50 to 60c.
 
The CPU usage is about 0% at idle. Like i said, there are no lag spikes due to CPU usage. My CPU isn't being clogged, it's as if the computer is waiting on the HDD so it can load things.
 
Ok so these last few days i have taken the HDD to get checked and ran several tests on it myself. The HDD passes any error tests, but even when i run windows from an external HDD and try to access the internal HDD, it is still slow on response, ruling out the possibility of a corrupted OS or bad drivers. It's a Toshiba. The tests i ran involve windows disk checker, seatools, and even defragging, however defragging always feezes (it reports 27% fragmentation).
 
I don't know how to get the HDD out of the laptop... plus it's the only laptop i have, and i don't think it would fit a desktop.
 
Yes a laptop will work in a desktop, laptop hard drives have the same data and power connections desktop drives do. You can always try using rufus to make your usb drive bootable and then put the iso image of DFT on it.

Get rufus and instructions here.

https://rufus.akeo.ie/
 
Ok, so i did finally get the HDD out of the laptop and hooked up to my Dell Inspiron 530s. It is still exhibiting most of the same symptoms (Although it is faster, almost normal speed now). The Defrag is still taking insane amounts of time, and navigation on the drive is iffy. It navigates OK, but i'm thinking it might just be indexing at work. Either way, i'm gonna make a image of this HDD (to save the OS) and reformat it. Thinking of migrating to an SSD, however i'm not sure atm.
 
If you go SSD, then you would want to install fresh anyway. Don't want to clone something with issues to a new drive.
 
Yeah I'd fresh install instead. Setting up a new environment takes less time than it would to back up and restore an existing image (and one that you're having issues with currently).
 
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