Laptop 'freezes' for about a second every few seconds

[Dekurk]

 Dear forumusers,

First of all i'd like to apologize for any spelling errors and for if I put this topic on the wrong board. I will supply my system specs at the bottom of my post. I have been using my HP EliteBook 8540W for about 4 years now. Lately (the last few months) i have been experiencing my computer 'freezing up' for a second and then continue with no problem. The problem seems to be worse during games to the point where it happens every few seconds and makes games unplayable. Some games like league of legends even just comletely freeze my laptop after 15 minutes, and i don't mean an overheat shutdown which is common with this model but fixed with a laptop cooler. My insticts pointed towards videocard drivers, so i updated those, no change. I decided to run Malwarebytes to scan and remove malware, no change. I checked my HD for errors/bad sectors, none found. What could this problem be? I'm pretty sure my hardware should be capable of running my games (League of legends, minecraft, war thunder), or windows for that matter, without freezing up constantly as friends with exactly the same laptop can. In between these freezes the performance is fine with high fps (at low settings obv). Is this a problem with my windows? or is it my videocard slowly dying maybe? I'm considering a reinstall of Windows but don't know if my HD has a recovery partition, and the startup menu doesn't seem to offer a reinstall option. I do need to mention that 2 years ago my HD got replaced by HP as they suspected it to be the cause of a problem, which turned out to be a shortcut in the powerbutton. I did back up all my important files. please help, thanks! 

Specs:

OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 32 bit (although i think my laptop is 64 bit??)

CPU: Intel core i7 Q 720 @ 1.6GHz

Videocard: NVIDIA Quadro fx 880M

RAM: 4GB

HD: Toshiba MK3261GSYN (300gb)

[1029rjmenvy17t]

Hi: Your PC Is To Old To Game Buy HP OMEN 15 With 960M And Intel Core i7 2.6 Up Turbo Boost 3.6GHz

Man Based On Your Specs Your Processer Is Causing All Problems And Mabey You GPU Too But Look Your Processor Is The Main Problem Here Add The Hard Drive If You Want

I Do Not Work At HP

[Dekurk]

Thanks for the reply!

Buying a brand new PC/laptop would be nice if i had the dough for it, but seeing as i'm a student with little to spare that's simply not an option for me. I understand my 1.6GHz i7 isn't the fastest around, but is should still be capable of running games like LoL without freezing for seconds constantly? when i look at my task manager CPU usage during gaming it doesn't seem to be running at anywhere near 100%. I did a reinstall of Windows yesterday to exclude any problems with my operating system, but the problem persists. Is there a way to make my CPU perform better while gaming (i already close all other applications and run on lowest possible settings)?

Cheers, Wouter

[1029rjmenvy17t]

When It Comes To Games You Ether Can Run Them Or Not

However With System Performance Well You Can Work With It

So I See When Your Using Windows The Processor Run 100%? The Way To Fix This Is To Go To Task Manager When This Is Happening And Look For The Process That Is Causing It If You Find Let Me Know What The Name Of It Is And We Can See If We Can Fix The Problem

PS: Games Are Funny They Use A Lot Processor And Graphics Just Like You I Had A Computer And Still That Had A Good Processor But Bad Graphics Card And The Only Thing That Fixed It Was Buying The PC Said Before But Not Everybody Can Do That

But System Performance We Can Try To Fix Up To Make Your Computer A Little Faster For Windows And Maybe For Games But Mostly For Windows And Your Programs

[Dekurk]

Thanks for the response!

It would be very nice to tweak my laptop so that the freezing problem is less or dissapears.

I have downloaded 3Dmark to benchmark my performances.

Turns out its not my CPU but my GPU being the bottleneck in my system. I looked up if and if so how to overclock it and found advice on it. I overclocked to 675/900/1485 MHz as adviced and it does improve my 3Dmark score by about 500 points, without my GPU getting too hot. I tried playing War Thunder to see if the freezing problem was fixed, and even ran it on a lower resolution than usual. The GPU load is now not 100% anymore with the new resolution and the overclock, but still, the ingame freezes persist. I took a screenshot of my open hardware monitor graphs during a game and included it. I can make another one with different sensors being displayed if you think it can help.

Thanks again for taking the time!

[1029rjmenvy17t]

Yeah Were Is The Screenshot I Cant Open It?

PS: The Only Thing I Would Say Is That When The GPU Is Overdrive It Will Get Hot Then Stop Working For A Few Seconds To Cool Off And That Is Probably Your Problem And You Can Not Fix That Because It Is The Cooling System On The Computer:

What Is Probably Happening Is The GPU Is OLD So It Has To Be Overdrive To Play Games And That Is Were Gets Very Hot And Needs To Be Cooled Off

[Dekurk]

Uploading the image here doesn't seem to be working, so i uploaded it to tinypic, here is the link:

http://nl.tinypic.com/r/21dev5f/8

[T4M]

Its either dying HDD , or RAM

[Dekurk]

The HDD has been replaced bout two years ago. I did a diskcheck before my clean install, and it showed no errors or bad sectors. I will run it once more and post results when its done. Is there a way to check if the amount of RAM is the issue? and would changing from 32 to 64 bit, causing my system to see 4GB instead of 2.9 or something, not cause the issue to get better (at least a bit), which it didn't? Thanks for taking the time to help me out with this!

[T4M]

Use smth like Memtest86+ to check RAM , as for 32 & 64 it shouldnt make any difference , just some of ur ram being not used on 32.

As for hdd 2 years is a lot , ive seen hdd's who died within month so yeah , u can run  some hdd software aswell like Hddtune to check if its really good.