I've got a relatively new Dell e4300 laptop running Windows 7 32-bit (fully updated). Several times throughout the day, it will seem to hang. When this happens, I'm able to move the mouse but the rest of the desktop essentially freezes. The hard drive activity light shows that it's busy working on something but I'm not sure what. This lasts for approximately 30 seconds and then everything returns to normal.
Unfortunately, since this happens at seemingly random times, I'm not able to get the task manager up in time to see what is happening.
What troubleshooting steps can I take to determine what's going on here? I've ran SMART diagnostics on the hard drive (which is a Western Digital btw) and it comes back fine.
Best Answer
This is not necessarily a hard drive problem. At a minimum, I'd run LatencyMon to see if there's any particularly problematic driver or software utility that's obviously causing the system to sit around doing nothing waiting on a response.
If you're a bit more technically savvy, you should almost certainly be able to pin down the exact culprit with XPerf (part of the Windows Performance Analysis kit), but it may be a little too involved for the shy or faint of heart.