At times, for instance after running a resource-intensive program, my normally quite stable Windows7 PC becomes virtually unresponsive for as long as a couple of minutes. Even changing directory in Explorer can show the green progress bar for several seconds, clicking a tab in Chrome causes it to detach in a separate window for 10s, etc.
During this, the CPU usage is virtually zero, nothing is taking more than 1% CPU in TaskManager and the total CPU is often only 2% or so.
Over time, things slowly "heal" to the normal state of responsiveness but computers don't need to heal themselves after working hard!
What problem is this indicative of and what can I do about it? I am running MSE virus-scanner but that's about it for real-time protection.
Best Answer
I've found such problems before; as others have said, it was often due to HDD failure, but also I've seen it with Windows XP on a solid-state HDD in a HP Mini 110 netbook, some years ago. When the disk was busy writing, the whole thing would often be quite unusable. The problem did not manifest with other OSes, such as Ubuntu, and I can't say about Windows 7.
It may be worth looking for a driver update or trying a different OS (even from a Live CD or similar).
In Windows, it is useful to look at the Performance Monitor (as distinct from the Resource Monitor), and in the Performance > Monitoring tools > Performance Monitor tree, add (green plus icon) and under the Physical Disk part of the tree, add the entries that relate to the Queue Size. I suspect you'll find that one of your disks will have a queue size that is often very high for long periods of time.