Loading / CPU capping (chugging) problems with HDD???

[BeardedKitty]

I want your guys' opinions / knowledge.

I've been streaming with my current setup for about a year now but since Christmas it's been giving me troubles. When I stream I have about 3 to 5 programs running and I have 2 monitors and one TV plugged in via HDMI. I could tell over time my PC was taking longer and longer to open programs and would chug away at startup (7 mins to fully start up).

I have an i5-6600K Intel CPU, Asus GeForce 1060 STRIX GPU, ASRock motherboard and 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4 Ram. All those parts are roughly a year old but the only part that still needs replacing is my HDD. It's over 10 years old lol. I plan on buy a Samsung Evo 2TB SSD, but I just want to confirm if this is causing the slow down and making things chug away and not allowing my streams to go live (it's causing my StreamLabs OBS to have errors like going live but not actually being live or audio problems or visual problems and it didn't before)

Also, when I'm trying to edit videos, the software will crash while I'm doing stuff after about 5 mins. It's almost as if I'm going to fast for the program to keep up.

Any ideas are helpful :smile_cat:

 

[jojesa]

A failing HDD (corrupted sectors, etc) could make a computer to have errors and slow down.
But you could have a combination of issues, like slow downs of the streaming servers.
I do hope you have backup your precious files.

I would suggest you get a 500GB SSD and a 2-3TB HDD.

 

[BeardedKitty]

A failing HDD (corrupted sectors, etc) could make a computer to have errors and slow down.
But you could have a combination of issues, like slow downs of the streaming servers.
I do hope you have backup your precious files.

I my *important* files are all on a 2TB external hard drive. But I was thinking of attempting to reinstall windows completely and start fresh to see if it continues.

 

[jojesa]

... I was thinking of attempting to reinstall windows completely and start fresh to see if it continues.

It could be a good idea to start from scratch but no on a 10 year old HDD.
Have you checked the health of your hard drive?

 

[BeardedKitty]

... I was thinking of attempting to reinstall windows completely and start fresh to see if it continues.

It could be a good idea to start from scratch but no on a 10 year old HDD.
Have you checked the health of your hard drive?

I have not. How may I do such a thing?

 

[jojesa]

You could use CHKDSK.
Right-click on the HDD you would like to check for errors, then select 'Properties.
Select the 'Tools' tab, and then click on the 'Check now' button.
A dialog opens up with two options to 'fix errors' and 'scan for bad sectors'.
You can select them both if you want errors and bad sectors to be repaired automatically or you can just click on 'Start'.
By the way this is basic tool that focuses on finding system errors and bad sectors and it will not fix any hardware issues with your drive like an aging motor or bad head.

 

[BeardedKitty]

You could use CHKDSK.
Right-click on the HDD you would like to check for errors, then select 'Properties.
Select the 'Tools' tab, and then click on the 'Check now' button.
A dialog opens up with two options to 'fix errors' and 'scan for bad sectors'.
You can select them both if you want errors and bad sectors to be repaired automatically or you can just click on 'Start'.
By the way this is basic tool that focuses on finding system errors and bad sectors and it will not fix any hardware issues with your drive like an aging motor or bad head.

Well I scanned the drive, it said no errors were found. I'm on windows 10 btw so the process was slightly different. Still having issues with programs crashing and not being able to go live. While I was editing I was watching task manager and my cpu was definitely peaking. Will check temps and clean my PC. I'll update on what happens then. I will be really disappointed if I have to replace my CPU tho. It's an i5 and barely a year old...

 

[jojesa]

Well I scanned the drive, it said no errors were found. I'm on windows 10 btw so the process was slightly different. Still having issues with programs crashing and not being able to go live. While I was editing I was watching task manager and my cpu was definitely peaking. Will check temps and clean my PC. I'll update on what happens then. I will be really disappointed if I have to replace my CPU tho. It's an i5 and barely a year old...

I really doubt is your CPU, if it was your CPU your PC might not even boot.
Did you see what was making your CPU peak in the Task Manager?
Check your RAM using Memtest86+ just to rule that out. Let it run for 8 passes.
I think you need to reinstall Windows into a new disk.

 

[BeardedKitty]

Well I scanned the drive, it said no errors were found. I'm on windows 10 btw so the process was slightly different. Still having issues with programs crashing and not being able to go live. While I was editing I was watching task manager and my cpu was definitely peaking. Will check temps and clean my PC. I'll update on what happens then. I will be really disappointed if I have to replace my CPU tho. It's an i5 and barely a year old...

I really doubt is your CPU, if it was your CPU your PC might not even boot.
Did you see what was making your CPU peak in the Task Manager?
Check your RAM using Memtest86+ just to rule that out. Let it run for 8 passes.
I think you need to reinstall Windows into a new disk.

I couldn't figure out how to get the memtest86 to work but I did get the Windows Memory Diagnostic to run at start up. It returned no errors. Here's a screenshot of my task manager when I'm trying to use my editing software. When I do things it'll get up to 96% CPU for a few seconds but then drop below 50% and if I just let it sit idle it'll drop below 10-20%.

http://

 

[jojesa]

I see that 'Movie Studio Platinum' is using 77.5% of your CPU, so 22.5% is available for the rest of apps and services.
Were you rendering a video?

 

[BeardedKitty]

Nope, just zooming in and out of the video/audio clips or watching the video in the editor to see which bits needs to be removed.

 

[jojesa]

Movie Studio Platinum is using too much CPU in your system. I understand using up to 100% while editing/rendering, but it should not use more that 45% while just browsing.
Have you try cleaning up garbage files in the temporary files cache and I resenting Movie Studio Platinum back to factory defaults?