Windows 7 Keeps Pausing!... New Build.

[PowerPie5000]

I've finished building a budget system for my brothers girlfriend and it's got a very annoying problem that i can't figure out! Windows will just pause when i try opening/running 'most' things (can pause for upto 20 seconds at a time!)... All the memory timings, voltages and temps seem fine, and the PSU should be sufficient for this build...

AMD Athlon II X3 455 (3.3Ghz)
Gigabyte GA-M68MT-S2P (rev 3.0) motherboard
8GB (2X4GB) Corsair Value DDR3 1333 RAM (CMG4VX3M1A1333C9)
1GB XFX Radeon 6770 GPU
250GB Seagate Barracuda HDD (SATA-II)
Samsung CDRW/DVDRW combo drive (SATA)
530W Hiper Type-M PSU (V3 with combined output of 32A on the +12V rails)
Fractal Core 1000 Micro-ATX case
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (OEM)

I've emailed Gigabyte as the default CPU voltages are a bit too high (set automatically as 1.45V in the bios and drift as high as 1.49V according to CPU-Z and HWmonitor!)... I've manually adjusted it to reach a max of 1.40V.

Anyone have any ideas?

[jim]

I had this with my first Windows Vista machine, spent several months looking for solutions and never found any.

It would apparently do absolutely nothing for up to 1 minute, and then suddenly burst into life and all sorts of processes would appear out of nowhere and run the processor to its limits.

Personally, I would try reinstalling Windows - when I had it, it sure as hell wasn't a hardware issue. Everything worked fine when I went back to XP, and when I installed Vista a while later it worked perfectly.

[PowerPie5000]

I had this with my first Windows Vista machine, spent several months looking for solutions and never found any.

It would apparently do absolutely nothing for up to 1 minute, and then suddenly burst into life and all sorts of processes would appear out of nowhere and run the processor to its limits.

Personally, I would try reinstalling Windows - when I had it, it sure as hell wasn't a hardware issue. Everything worked fine when I went back to XP, and when I installed Vista a while later it worked perfectly.

I've run all kinds of tests, tried other parts and have concluded it's not a hardware issue... I've got a feeling it's an Nvidia SATA driver problem (i don't usually buy mobo's with Nvidia chipsets these days as something always went wrong with them in the past!)... I say this because the PC almost hangs when running software that tries to detect the SATA controller! I'm just gonna reinstall Windows and not bother with Nvidia chipset drivers (just stick with the default MS SATA drivers).

This cheapo Gigabyte board doesn't seem to have any option to enable AHCI mode for the HDD. Upon boot (post screen) it displays the SATA HDD and optical drives as IDE devices (Windows 7 has the HDD listed as a SCSI drive).

[PowerPie5000]

It's definitely a problem with Nvidia's crappy chipset drivers! I remember when their SATA drivers were plagues with problems a few years ago, seems nothing has changed in that department.

Anyway, i did i clean install of Win7 x64 and everything was fine until the Nvidia chipset drivers were installed... Windows kept stalling/pausing after that, so then i reverted back to the MS SATA drivers and now it's working fine! The motherboard uses Nvidia's GeForce 7025/nForce 630a chipset (which seems a bit old for a 2011 budget board)... The default MS SATA drivers show up as nforce 430a but still seem to work fine.

[Pancake]

Check the drive using trial of HD Tune, worth a shot

[CX23882-19]

I had a weird issue related to the USB card reader built into my monitor. It would cause ~30 second delays when launching certain programs when it was connected.

But also, as others have said, nVidia's SATA drivers are awful. Always try to use the Microsoft-provided driver, even if it means having to fall back to IDE emulation mode.

[PowerPie5000]

Check the drive using trial of HD Tune, worth a shot

Already done and it turned out to be fine

I had a weird issue related to the USB card reader built into my monitor. It would cause ~30 second delays when launching certain programs when it was connected.

But also, as others have said, nVidia's SATA drivers are awful. Always try to use the Microsoft-provided driver, even if it means having to fall back to IDE emulation mode.

The only USB ports connected are the one's found on the case and motherboard (which are functioning correctly)... I have a feeling the SATA HDD is running in IDE mode as there doesn't seem to be any option for AHCI mode in the bios. Even on boot it says something along the lines of 'Detecting IDE Devices' and the HDD and optical drive are listed below it.