Question PC unresponsive after startup

[je1983]

So my pc crashed yesterday, just stopped and froze up in the middle of a video and when I restarted it, I noticed it took ages for all the programs and stuff to load up. Things like dropbox, wd discovery on the lower right panel. I moved the mouse around and things would respond slowly when I clicked the menu button. Shortly after this everything froze up except for the mouse which was moving around freely.

After another restart, more of the same thing. Shortly after trying to do anything at all, access the menu, click on files, open windows, it would freeze up.

I ran it on safe mode and it all worked fine albeit rather slowly. Ran an Panda antivirus and Malwarebytes, nothing was found. Af.ter that I turned it on before going to bed and it seems to have been running fine overnight. As soon as I started trying to click on stuff, it slowed again and eventually froze up apart from the mouse.



I'm running a windows 7 home premium on an asus B150m-a motherboard, i5, 3.2ghz, 16gig ram



EDIT:

Earlier this year, I added a new extra hdd which disappeared and reappeared a few times, sometimes accessing the drive would cause the pc to freeze up.
I traced it down to possibly a bad cable or sata port and I now have it connected and running fine. Not sure if I should look into that again?


EDIT2: I have not installed anything new at all.

 

[thai_rat]

Look at your event log for problems, disconnect sata cable, if no joy, disconnect all usb devices and try again.

If ok, try plugging them in one by one, and see if you can isolate the source.

 

[ProgamerIV]

Try running without that HDD you added, if you had problems with that earlier, that's definitely the first thing I'd check.

Do you have a dedicated GPU, or are you running with the i5's integrated graphics?
If you have a dedicated GPU, disconnect it and try running without that.
Does your screen go black when the PC freezes, or not?

 

[je1983]

Thanks guys. Event log shows nothing unusual and I am not using any gpu other than what's on the mobo.

I ran it again on safe mode, but it still froze up when I started up normally. Then, safe mode with networking, I did nothing different other than transfer files to a hdd just to be safe. Also ran malwarebytes and panda again with networking and updated before scan. Still no issues with either scan.

After that i tried running normally. My next step was going to be to remove the hdd that had previously caused issues as progameriv suggested but now it seems to be running ok.

I'm still interested to figure out what caused this in case it happens again, and just increase my understanding in general, so any additional info and suggestions would help