PC random lag/intermittent freezes

Hi,

I've recently got a new pc (6 months old now), and installed xp on it initially.
Anyway lately I've been having some issues with it -

Video on youtube, mediaplayer etc can stutter with one continuous tone sounding and while it happens the mouse freezes etc.
Audio is having the same problem sometimes too.

Now and again, sometimes fine for 30mins or so, but then it can start lagging, if I am typing when it happens, it missed out letters that are pressed but not all.

Also at times windows can take a long time to load - wallpaper screen shows, but it can display the desktop icons sometimes some minutes later, sometimes I restart as it takes so long. Safe mode boots up with no slowness though.

I've run malwarebytes and hitman and they found nothing but tracking cookies
I ran a program to check the temperature and it was not high.

One thing however, the motherboard drivers wouldnt load as they are not made for xp (I am upgrading to windows 8 soon though). Windows only shows 3.15gb of the 8gb installed RAM.

I am planning to run a ram checking program to see if there is faulty ram or not.

If anyone has an idea what it might be please let me know. I've checked similar posts on here but they were different to this (it seemed anyway).

Thanks!

 

This computer's only 6 months old and it has XP on it??? Are you running 32-bit or 64-bit? If it's 32-bit, that explains the "missing" RAM. 32-bit only supports up to 4GB and since Windows "keeps" some for itself, only 3.15GB is useable.

As far as the video/audio stutter, do you have the latest version of Flash Player installed?

As far as the slow desktop, have a look at your startup programs with Autoruns and disable the third party ones you don't need (you can set it to hide the ones from Microsoft).

 

What OS came with the machine when you got it, or was it a No OS at all on the machine? XP is the problem, since it is getting close to the bury in the ground date. You would probably be better to use Windows 7 or a Linux distro.

I am using Xubuntu 12.04 LTS 64-bit until 14.04 LTS comes out. I have had less problems running Linux, then I did running Windows 8, which originally came with this machine.

The plus side is that this unit runs a lot faster then it did with Windows 8.1 installed.

 

Thanks for the replies, It had the option of having win8 installed but I went with nothing installed just threw on xp. Mainly because I was going to update it later but my other pc was on the blink and I didn't want to have to get used to the new windows until work and some other things were calmer.

The pc ran fine for most of the time - this freezing has started in the last 1-2 weeks.
I have the latest flash player, but when I go to task manager when the desktop is slow loading malwarebytes is the highest memory using program, I've also noticed if I go to shut down/restart etc, the window often freezes too.

XP is 32 bit as far as I know..is there a way to determine if I should get windows 8 in 32 or 64?
Cheers

 

I could have sworn I posted a reply, but its not showing.

Thanks for the replies, I've got the latest flash player, and autorun items I am not sure but malwarebytes uses the most memory when the wallpaper is showing etc. If I go to shut down/restart often task manager freezes.

I had the option of windows 8 pre installed but opted not so as I wanted to wait for work etc to calm down a bit before switching to a newer OS. But I haven't got round to it yet. The deadline on xp updates has reminded me about it though.

Windows XP is 32 bit yeah, I checked. Is there a way of determining if I could run windows 8 64 bit on it, or if it has to be 32 bit instead?

Cheers

 

If it is a new computer, it will run a 64-bit OS. I doubt that flash is the problem. The problem is that you are running a 15 year old OS, soon to be 16 year old on a computer, that should be running a Linux 64-bit distro or Windows 7 64-bit.

On my personal laptop, I only run Xubuntu 64-bit on it. I have never had any issues with it.

 

The fact that the computer had 8GB of RAM installed "right out of the box" tells me it's a 64-bit machine and while you can run 32-bit on it, you should make use of what you have by running what it was designed for — 64-bit. That way you'll have the full 8GB of RAM to work with.