Strange lagging system issue

JuanPablo269

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Jul 25, 2011
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Hello,

Have spent ages trying to diagnose this problem but come up short, hoping someone can advise me.

I bought a (nearly) brand new dell studio xps 16 at the end of last year. Worked perfectly for everything until about a month ago when overnight it suddenly started lagging at random (but frequent intervals). When it does lag, it isn't a full system freeze, certain elements (e.g. a flash game in firefox) might still run animations, however any video clips will lag, audio will stretch out in a continuous drone, the cursor will freeze and text will stop mid-typing, with all the subsequently typed characters appearing moments later.

I have run lots of diagnostic tests including memtest86, tuneup utilities tests, seagate's own hard drive diagnostic utility, full antivirus, an ATI diagnostic tool, a registry cleaner and a driver diagnostic.
I have also formatted the hard drive and re-installed windows 7 64bit. Twice. All to no avail.

I am completely stumped on this and am hoping someone will have seen this before/might have an idea as to the problem.

I should point out that prior to this issue, no software or hardware changes were made to the system, nor were any updates downloaded (at least to my knowledge).

Help!

System specs:

Dell Studio XPS 16 (US version)
*Windows 7 64bit
*Intel Core i5-M540 @ 2.53GHz
*Seagate Momentus XT 500GB Hard Drive
*ATI Radeon HD Mobility 5730
*4GB RAM

**********

One thing I have discovered is that if I run a video file from the hard drive it lags frequently. If I copy that file onto an external USB hard drive and run it, barely any lagging.
 

wintermint

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Sep 30, 2009
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Ok do you regularly clean up your files and defragment them? If no, go download CCleaner and Defraggler from piriform. After you run the programs, and use their functions, see if there's improvements