PC Crashing and Performance Problems

[colec18]

Recently I have been having crashing and preformance issues. I'm running Windows 8.1 64B an i5 4670k stable at 4.4 GHz and 16Gb of 1866Mhz RAM on a MSI z87m motherboard. Over the last few days I have had programs randomly crash, the computer freezes up and then I have to force power off. Aldo drive usage on all 3 of my drives has been weird with them randomly going up too 100% usage. I have run malwarebytes and cleaned the computer and nothing has changed. I think it might be a virus but nothing changes after that so do you guys have any idea what might be going on and how to fix it.

[TetraSky]

When troubleshooting, get rid of the overclock. If it's still crashing, at least that rules that out. (Even if it was stable a while ago, it can become unstable overtime)

 

Malwarebytes is NOT an anti virus(how people keep making that mistake is beyond me), do a proper scan with AVG free or Avast free or using a rescue disk of whichever paid anti virus you may have but aren't using anymore. Windows Defender only offer basic protection against common viruses and is only good enough if you are careful on the web.

If there's still nothing, it could be hardware related, in which case, you're gonna have to run some diagnostic tests, like memtest, for at least 24 hours, but considering you say all your drives randomly go up to 100% usage, I'd be more inclined to say it's virus related.

[colec18]

OK thanks, I have a copy of spybot do you think that would work better than malware bytes?

[TetraSky]

OK thanks, I have a copy of spybot do you think that would work better than malware bytes?

It's basically the same thing(just not as good), but with Spybot you can also check what applications boot with windows, so you might be able to remove the infection from there (doubt it but it's worth a try), just be sure to not remove something important like drivers.

But really, Both Spybot and Malwarebytes are not anti virus, just get AVG or Avast(NOT both), do the scan, delete it afterward if you don't want it.

 

Most paid Anti virus also offer a free, downloadable rescue disk that you can burn and run outside of windows (on boot), searching " name-of-av rescue disk " generally give good results.

Like Kaspersky, Norton(don't hate, it works), ESET, etc...

I'd recommend one of those, considering it scans OUTSIDE of windows, thus viruses cannot interfere with it and makes it easier to get rid of infected files since they aren't running in the background.