Laptop issue, hanging and stuttering

Hello!

I apologize in advance if this is really long or if it is in the wrong section.. I've been trying to figure it out myself, doing everything I could think of and following any advice I could find online but so far nothing has helped. It's my mother's laptop which I'm borrowing so that my fiance and I can play games together but I've also been using it for artwork and web browsing. I'm 90% sure the laptop is an HP Pavilion dv7-4177nr with Windows 7 64 Home Premium. It has a AMD Phenom II Dual-Core N640 (2.9GHz) CPU, 6GB Memory, a 640GB HDD, and a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 GPU with 512mb dedicated memory. The GPU is also switchable to a 4000 series but I forget which one it is exact. 4200 or something like that maybe? It's not the greatest laptop in the world, especially for gaming, but it gets the job done. Or at least it did..

Anyway, here's the problems I'm having. About five or six months ago I started experiencing seemingly random hangups while playing games, watching videos (Youtube, Windows Media Player, VLC Media Player), and even when listening to music (Windows Media Player). Over the months I've tried finding out what the problem was but haven't been able to and it's only gotten worse. The hangups would come more often at times but sometimes things would be fine for a while. More recently, like within the last month, it's worsened significantly and is now affecting almost everything I do on the computer including browsing the internet and even windows explorer. The hangups are now every few seconds to every few minutes. I believe the longest I've gone is maybe a half an hour before experiencing one. Some games are now almost unplayable and the rest are still mostly playable but it often leads to frustration (like playing World of Warcraft or Minecraft and dieing due to the hanging keeping me from reacting to things).

The hanging itself is hard to explain. In games it's like my FPS drops to 0 (it does actually drop as far as I can) for anywhere from a second to upward of a half a minute (I counted seconds in my head for one I got last week that lasted 36 seconds, give or take a couple). During that time the sound either skips like a broken record or goes silent only to be played several seconds after the hanging has ended. When it's the latter it's usually all the sounds from that time playing all at once.. For Firefox it will stop responding and I can move my mouse around but nothing actually works. If I click on the start button for example it won't actually bring up the menu until everything goes back to normal. Windows explorer and other applications usually just freeze up with the spinning waiting circle cursor (I forget what it's actually called, the Win7 equivalent of the hourglass) until it goes back to normal. During that time nothing else works just like with Firefox. I've checked the processes and it always lists the program I'm using as being the one with the most CPU usage during the spikes where it hangs.

I've tried checking to see if the laptop was overheating and even took it apart myself and to clean out any dust or debris I found (which was actually very little). Even went as far as trying various ways to ensure it was cool with fans and the like. It seemed to help a tiny bit but it could have also just been me being overly optimistic. I followed a guide I found here on removing viruses and malware and managed to find a few and remove them but again it didn't help. About three months ago I finally had enough and completely reinstalled Windows 7 again fresh only to find the problems still remained. Since then I've updated drivers to the newest ones I could find, updated the bios, and installed all windows updates. I've disabled the sound card (would you call it that in a laptop?) and even tried the default windows drivers since it was a suggestion I found online but that didn't help (I've since then switched it back). I've ran the windows memory diagnostic tool and it came up fine. I've scanned the HDD for errors and defragged it. There's probably more I've done but at the moment I can't think of it.. I'm at a loss at this point and really don't know what to do anymore. If you've stuck with me this far and can offer any advice or help it would be greatly appreciated. I will try to read and respond to any replies when I can. Thank you!

 

If you can, go to Start and type in "eventvwr" (without the quotes), run it and report the findings back here. Also do the same for "msconfig" and report back here with the startup/autorun programs. This will give us a better idea of what may be causing the hangups.

 

How do I do that? I've messed with event viewer briefly before but I have no idea how to post anything from it. Same for MSConfig, do I just manually type out what's starting up?

 

I had no idea that nifty little utility even existed in Windows. Thanks! I had a third party application to take screen captures before (haven't installed it since reinstalling Windows) but I never even thought of using it. Lack of sleep is really catching up with me. LOL

Alright, everything fit in one capture so I only took the one but here it is:
http://thumbnails110.imagebam.com/31924/1b91aa319239095.jpg

 

I forgot to mention something in my last post and I can't seem to find any way to edit it so forgive me for posting again.

Last night I followed some advice I found in another Google search and disabled all startup items and non-Windows services then rebooted the computer but the problem still persists, albeit a little less frequently it seemed. I was unsure if this new information would help at all but I thought it wouldn't hurt posting it.

 

I had a feeling it might be hardware related but I wasn't sure, wanted to at least rule out it being a software issue. I did a few searches but the threads I seen that were similar didn't have anything I haven't tried or any solutions so I'm going to do as you suggested and make a thread over there myself. Thank you very much for your help and advice!