Laptop starts randomly loading as if loading a demanding program

[haris15]

Hello

I have an Acer Aspire 5552 laptop. Basically, when I am browsing the internet, or doing anything, randomly the laptop will start loading. Basically, it makes that loading sound as if you are firing up a game and the loading light starts flashing, the laptop also becomes slow around this point. It can last 30 seconds - 1 minute, which makes it very frustrating.

I have ran Malwarebytes and got rid of all threats (which were non malware), and have avast! anti-virus installed. It has been fine all the time until the past month. Whenever I open the task manager, firefox is always taking up most memory when I am using it. So what is the problem?

My specs are:

AMD Athlon II X2 P320 @2.1ghz On Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250
3GB DDR3 Memory

 

[Entomber]

when this "loading" happens, I suggest you open up Resource Monitor and see what is taking up a large portion of your Disk activity. My bet is that it's your antivirus doing some background scans, which is locking up your computer.

 

[haris15]

when this "loading" happens, I suggest you open up Resource Monitor and see what is taking up a large portion of your Disk activity. My bet is that it's your antivirus doing some background scans, which is locking up your computer.

Thanks for your reply. I don't really get this stuff but I opened up mozilla firefox, and opened a few other applications and AvastSvc.exe was one of the highest in terms of disk activity.

It had total (B/sec) 199,944 when I opened Mozilla
And had total (B/sec) 545,603 when I opened up MS word

What does this mean? And how can I lower this?

 

[Entomber]

that probably means your Avast is scanning your computer a lot when opening new programs. This type of behavior is typical of many antivirus programs, but it has a big impact on system performance, especially since your HDD can only spin so fast. Personally, I use Bitdefender (both free and paid versions) as my antivirus and it has an imperceptible impact on system performance.

 

[haris15]

Hello again.

I did uninstall avast! but the problem still persists. Any ideas on what it could be? On resource monitor it just comes up with "system" at the top?

 

[Entomber]

if "System" has a high disk usage, and you only have 3GB RAM and no mobile GPU, I would suspect that your computer is locking up because your RAM is fully utilized, and Windows is using the pagefile (using your hard drive like RAM).

 

[haris15]

if "System" has a high disk usage, and you only have 3GB RAM and no mobile GPU, I would suspect that your computer is locking up because your RAM is fully utilized, and Windows is using the pagefile (using your hard drive like RAM).

I do not think this is the case. In fact, for most games 3gb of RAM is plenty. All current games can run at 4gb RAM.

I have 600mb free when running demanding applications, so what would be the issue?

 

[Entomber]

in Resource Monitor, check out the Memory tab, and if there are a large number of so-called "hard faults" this is indicative of your system using the pagefile since the RAM is fully utilized.

 

[haris15]

in Resource Monitor, check out the Memory tab, and if there are a large number of so-called "hard faults" this is indicative of your system using the pagefile since the RAM is fully utilized.

I will keep an eye on that thanks. But today I did notice for a short time some clicking noises, I would assume they are coming from the hard drive, but nothing continious, it stopped after 30 seconds or so. Could this hard drive be reaching the end of its lifetime?

 

[Entomber]

clicking noises are never a good sign when they're coming from your hard drive, it could be on the brink of failure.