DPC issues!

Hello! new to the forum, and I am having a similar issue and wondering if someone here could help me.

What I did about two weeks ago:

-Installed Windows updates ("mandatory" these days because of Win10...)
-Updated my firewall (Zonealarm)
-Updater my antivirus (Avira Antivir)
-Vacuumed the underside of my laptop (which I do quite regularly)

The result: I left my laptop idle for about 4-5 hours as I was out drinking Friday night, came home and turned it off after browsing Youtube. The next morning I turned it on and immediately notice that something is wrong... I hear audio crackling / lagging whenever I'm opening websites, especially heavy ones like NatGeo.com and whatnot - and not only that, the mouse cursor itself lags behind sometimes as if my CPU suddenly would not be able to handle having 5-6 tabs open in Firefox while opening a 7th for example. Have not had any issues before this. It really takes the joy away from surfing the web and listening to music at the same time (as a note using Foobar and Spotify for my music listening). Incredibly frustrating.

Anyone have any ideas? my worst fear is that I've permanently damaged my CPU fan since the vacuuming probably made it spin faster than It's supposed to, but I have no idea how to confirm this. Could Windows update screw these things up? or my Zonealarm / Antivir updates? really seems odd since I've _never_ had any issues before. The laptop I'm using (Acer Aspire V3-571G) is about 2½ / 3 years old by now, and has worked flawlessly up to this point.

Any help is appreciated! cheers

Pho3nix said:

Anyone have any ideas? my worst fear is that I've permanently damaged my CPU fan since the vacuuming probably made it spin faster than It's supposed to, but I have no idea how to confirm this.

Any help is appreciated! cheers

To isolate any hardware damages you could try a System Restore to a point before the update.
(Provided that System Restore is turned on as by default it is turned off in Windows 10 for some unexplained reason )

theo54au said:

To isolate any hardware damages you could try a System Restore to a point before the update.
(Provided that System Restore is turned on as by default it is turned off in Windows 10 for some unexplained reason )

That was my first thought, but for some reason the restore point I created manually just prior to the re-boot was gone when I checked. I blame this on the max disk space usage of the SR being at 2GB (a mere 1%), I changed it to 50%).

I would first look at Avira and/or Zone Alarm as you stated those were both updated. Maybe remove one and see how things act. Also, pull the battery out and unplug the laptop. With both the battery out and computer unplugged, hold in the power button for 10 seconds. Leave the battery out and then plug in the unit and turn on and see how it behaves.