System Lagging and Sound Issue

[TikiTantrum]

System:
CPU: Intel i5-2400 3.10ghz
Mobo: ASUS Maximus IV Gene-Z/GEN3
Graphics Card: PNY GeForce GTX 560 (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5
Memory: G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3-1600
OS: Windows 7 64bit
PSU: Corsair CX500

Every so often my system will get very laggy (programs will freeze up and it will take a long time to register input) and audio will become static and distorted. Sometimes it will go back to normal but often requires a reboot.

I ran memtest for 27 hours with no errors.

Any ideas?

 

[hilltopmonk]

open up your case and check for dust. - if dustly take into a well ventilated area and spray with one of the CO2 canisters.
do a boot time scan (virus scan, malwarebytes and spybot S&D)
download and run CCleaner, tick "old prefetch data" and "environment path" as well as everything from the Applications tab - delete whatever it pulls up
do a full system defrag. - using either defraggler or auslogics disk defrag.
check for driver updates for anything that you have installed.
If problems started after installing something or a system update, roll back to an older configuration and see if that helps.

If none of these things work its time to start looking at hardware faults...

 

[TikiTantrum]

open up your case and check for dust. - if dustly take into a well ventilated area and spray with one of the CO2 canisters.
do a boot time scan (virus scan, malwarebytes and spybot S&D)
download and run CCleaner, tick "old prefetch data" and "environment path" as well as everything from the Applications tab - delete whatever it pulls up
do a full system defrag. - using either defraggler or auslogics disk defrag.
check for driver updates for anything that you have installed.
If problems started after installing something or a system update, roll back to an older configuration and see if that helps.

If none of these things work its time to start looking at hardware faults...

A good list, I'll start going through it.

 

[smorizio]

make sure you have the newest bios.if not use the mb bios updater in the bnios and update it.
also make sure you have xmp profile turned on so you have your ram running at max speed.

 

[TikiTantrum]

I updated my bios. No lagging yet. Will wait another day to make sure it's gone.

The previous bios version seemed to be fine until last week, why would it start messing with the stability of my system like that?

 

[hilltopmonk]

the bios in itself wouldn't cause that, but if there is something - windows for example - that has brought out an update that is attempting to use something on your chipset or cpu that has been disabled due to a lack of drivers then this problem will show up.

It could also be that a trojan or malware has hijacked your system - as a result I would still recommend running the security scans mentioned above

 

[TikiTantrum]

Problems continue. System froze up again, I restarted but had a hard time getting windows to boot. Finally (after several attempts) it started up only to get a BSOD.

What is happening to this machine?

 

[amorenn]

Run a hard drive test. The symptoms you're describing is that you're hitting a bad block on your hard drive or you have bad memory.

 

[hilltopmonk]

could also be RAM - remove and reseat. (one stick at a time)
could also be chipset - hope it is not this and check everything else first.

 

[TikiTantrum]

Ran HDTune on my hdd and got this result.

First time using hard drive scanning software so I don't really know what to take from this other than there is an error somewhere. It says it could be cable (physical inspection of cable seems fine) could it be my mobo's sata connectors or something else like that?

 

[smorizio]

make sure your drives are on the intel sata ports.

 

[TikiTantrum]

Installed a new drive, a SDD. All seems to be fine. Guess my old HDD was failing. Chose amorenn's reply because it led me to the hdd.

Thank you all for the help.

 

[TikiTantrum]

Best answer selected by TikiTantrum.