Laptop Constant Pauses and Freezes

[Justin.Fred.]

So i recently bought a second hand Acer Aspire 4830TG, with an i5 and GT540, 4 gigs of ram and a 500gb hhd. when i first started it up i noticed, a) unformatted and b) the laptop kept pausing even when clicking things on the home screen or file manager would cause it to pause for half a minute before resuming. After i reinstalled windows and the drivers the problem just became worse. Starting up windows is painful taking 10 minutes at times and loading games as well. Even after games have been loaded they wouls still freeze from time to time and then resume, could it be the hdd? because cpu and ram usage arent even used to the max. Even increasing the virtual memory and it still didnt work. so what could cause these minute long pauses and horrendous load times? its really annoying and i cant really determine whats causing them

[NetherRealm]

Have you tried checking the drives health with a disk checkup utility? You'll probably want to look at the SMART info for clues about what the issue is.

 

I personally use the one from passmark... DiskCheckup by PassMark

[KhakiHat]

What types of games are you trying to run?

[Mark77]

500gb HDD, good lord, get rid of that, go with a SSD.

 

Its practically criminal that Windows 10 will even allow itself to be installed on anything but a SSD.  

[Justin.Fred.]

On 3/28/2019 at 12:29 PM, KhakiHat said:

What types of games are you trying to run?

dota,cs,warframe, not really demanding stuff

[Justin.Fred.]

On 3/28/2019 at 1:48 PM, Mark77 said:

500gb HDD, good lord, get rid of that, go with a SSD.

 

Its practically criminal that Windows 10 will even allow itself to be installed on anything but a SSD.  

thing is i only have the budget for A) a new storage device or B) more ram, i need to know whats causing this and what do i invest in

[KhakiHat]

4 hours ago, Justin.Fred. said:

thing is i only have the budget for A) a new storage device or B) more ram, i need to know whats causing this and what do i invest in

Honestly, I'd just save for both. If you are only able to buy one or the other, then just pick one and buy it. Either way I'd HIGHLY recommend both be upgraded(it'll be worth saving for both and buying both down the line). HDD's nowadays are terrrible, while decent for storage, any operations taking place on the drive itself is a million times slower than a SSD.

 

Buying RAM will help the longevity of the machine, but looking at the MHz speed of the RAM and deciding whether or not the upgrade is even worth it is another thing.

 

If you do decide to buy the RAM instead of the SSD, the least you could do is do a little bit of disk clean up. There is plenty of software out there that can help declutter the drive to make it a little faster. Also make sure that there isn't any side programs stealing your computer's resources.