Windows explorer often temporarily unresponsive

[The Heretic Azazel]

I am running Windows 7 64 bit. Whenever I try to do anything in Explorer (navigate pages, open windows, etc) it locks up for a few seconds, sometimes a minute before I can do anything again.

Resource monitor shows good CPU and memory stats but constant hard disk usage spikes.

I have run Microsoft Security Essentials, Malwarebytes and Checkdisk. It has found no viruses, malware or bad hard drive sectors.

I have run HD Tune Pro and have two warnings: (05) Reallocated sector count and (C4) reallocated event count but it passes the SMART test and other basic tests.

And the weirdest part of all: when I play a video in Windows Media Player, the system runs almost seamlessly.

What is going on?

[Buffalobiian]

Does it happen in safe-mode?

(not really sure what's going on, but throwing in things you could test to help narrow it down)

[David75]

SSD?

Is it aligned?

Is it from OCZ and/or one having a JMICRON or Toshiba controler?

[Animeniax]

The SATA 7200rpm harddrive in my Win7-64 laptop does the same thing. The system is very slow to respond to commands, particularly with Windows explorer and Firefox. When the pause happens, the harddrive light is solid but there's no indication that anything is causing read/writes from/to the harddrive. Other programs like WMP open fine during these pauses.

Any ideas are appreciated.

[Buffalobiian]

Hoho, I just noticed a somewhat similar (but probably not related) problem on my own machine.

Involved hardware: WD 2TB 5400rpm HDD serving as a media drive for my W7-64 partition that is running on an SSD.

Presenting Complain: Explorer-window unresponsiveness (right-clicking, windows picture viewer) when highlighting a bunch of files that I unzipped moments ago. During the unzipping, the speed will fluctuate and my audio (song being played from the same HDD) will skip at odd intervals during it).

I attribute that to the disk being slow to retrieve/write the data because it's on its last 15.5GB of 1.8TB available space.. followed by NCQ placing lesser priority on my audio which resulted in the skipping.

[Kraco]

The only times I've experienced anything similar to this have been when I've accumulated a very long list of downloaded items on the Firefox Downloads list and have begun a new download for the first time after launching Firefox (like after turning on the computer). The HD activity was then continuously on for a while, the computer was extreme sluggish, and nothing seemed to happen. I'm not sure if it was due to Firefox/virus scanner going through all the files on the Downloads list or whatever, but when I cleared the list, the problem disappeared.

I also used to have a custom made program for modding an old game that for some reason drove my virus scanner crazy despite the fact it was perfectly 100% clean. I had to except the program's folder entirely from the virus scanner. Before the exception, it caused similar behavior: the virus scanner reserved the whole HD access time for itself and pretty much nothing else could be done with the HD.

So, I'd unplug the net connection and turn off the virus scanner for a test of seeing if it makes any difference. If something stresses the HD 100%, in modern computers it wouldn't take that much CPU time but it would really slow down anything else needing the HD.

[Archangel]

Try this bro

http://drp.su/

It's free and hella useful, might solve your problems too.

[Animeniax]

The SATA 7200rpm harddrive in my Win7-64 laptop does the same thing. The system is very slow to respond to commands, particularly with Windows explorer and Firefox. When the pause happens, the harddrive light is solid but there's no indication that anything is causing read/writes from/to the harddrive. Other programs like WMP open fine during these pauses.

Any ideas are appreciated.

So hopefully I don't jinx it, but my SSD has given me zero problems since switching to Google Chrome and away from Firefox. No more hangs or crashes or funny business. Sucks because I don't want to use just Google products, same as I don't want only shop at Walmart. Fight the power!