Windows 10 mysterious slow death every 30 minutes to an hour

My apologies that the title is not more descriptive but the most distinguishing detail about my problem is a complete lack of distinguishing details.

No error codes no repeatable cause no entries in the event viewer and no log files.

Let me give an example: I am browsing the web in Microsoft edge and after about 10 minutes I click a link and nothing happens, I click the back arrow and nothing happens, I try to change tabs and that works the first try so I try to change tabs again and nothing happens, I try to close the window and you guessed it.. nothing happens. I do win+x and click task manager to end the task manually and while the task manager opens nothing can be clicked on and the cpu usage and other fields all read zero and don't update.. so I click the x and it closes.. I try to open it again the same way and it doesn't open.. I try win+x again nothing happens I click the start button and it opens so I go through the menus to do a restart.. when I click ok the menu and windows close like they are supposed to but nothing happens.. I click Start again and nothing happens, I right click the start button that gives me a menu so I try to shutdown and it looks like it starts to close everything but then stops on a blank black screen with just a mouse cursor. Hard reset is only remaining option.

While the details change every time depending on what I try the same pattern seems to hold.. things just seem to stop suddenly without warning or a reason and while stuff seems like it works for example a program will open (though you cant interact with it after that) its like it cant do the same thing twice anymore.. if you successfully open a program and close it then it wont open again.. if you open a menu once and close it then it wont open again or more baffling still it will work a random number of times (2 to 4 usually) then stop, etc.

Windows 10 worked fine for over a month before this started happening but now its been doing this for about 3 weeks.

Tried a clean reinstall already.

Everything passes every hardware diagnostic I can find and running stress tests on the system outside of windows 10 (booting Hirens or another utility disk) results in it being stable as a mountain goat no matter how long I let it run at 100% use.

Any ideas?

By the way: the last time it slow locked (that's what I'm calling it) before posting this after hard rebooting the system it changed one of the colors in my windows theme from blue to orange.. seriously is Bill Gates trolling me?

DESKTOP-SDUAO4A-Mon_09_12_2016__80200_89.zip

After I updated to the anniversary edition things were fine the problem began much later and yes I already have that update.

I also already ran a chkdsk (even tried -r switch) and no problems found. The drive was a few years old though so after a few other troubleshooting steps and no progress I even replaced the hard drive and did a clean install of windows just to rule that (and possible undetected file corruption) out.

Ive tried both a clean boot and running in safe mode and the problem still occurs.

One more clue perhaps is that when the computer freezes, though I cannot begin a new one, it will still complete whatever file process was already in progress.

For example if I cut and paste 100GB of data from one drive to another and it begins the transfer if it freezes, though the transfer window will no longer update, the move process is still going, and if it said it estimates it will take an hour to finish on the frozen screen I can wait about an hour (until the hard drive light on my pc case stops flashing) then reboot the system and the files will be in their new location.

I'm actually still defragmenting the computer right now (using Piriform Defraggler) even though the OS [edit]UI[/edit] stopped responding two hours ago. I just have to wait for the hard drive light to go off before I hard reset the PC.

As for my hardware specs.. I'm not sure how that's going to help in troubleshooting since the hardware hasn't changed and its already been established that this hardware configuration was running without issues before but I will update it with what I remember (as I said its currently locked and I can't reboot it until the defrag is finished or else risk file corruption).

[edit] Thinking about how saying that the OS had stopped responding above was inaccurate has led me to believe that its not Windows that's freezing up but rather the user interface.. the computer is still doing everything it was told to before it freezes.. it will still play music and shuffle to the next track for example if I have an audio player running I can just no longer use any of the buttons to interact with it. So very strange.

You shouldn't have to defrag in windows 10... it's done automatically in the background. If your hard drive is indeed fine physically, perhaps a different component is starting to fail. Perhaps you have a memory leak?

Carsomyr said:

You shouldn't have to defrag in windows 10... it's done automatically in the background. If your hard drive is indeed fine physically, perhaps a different component is starting to fail. Perhaps you have a memory leak?

Well as I said I had moved 100gb of data off the system drive to fix a thrashing issue and wanted to rush consolidating the movable parts of the OS to improve read speed. Also heavy use of the hard drive seems to reliably make a freeze happen sooner rather than later so I started it to test a configuration change (didn't fix the problem).

As for a memory leak... monitoring temps and usage statistics was the first thing I did and everything reads normal and well below maximums.

[edit] Or did you mean a failing stick of RAM? I ran hardware diagnostics and burn in test to see if I could get any of the sticks to fail and they all held up. I know passing diagnostics doesn't rule out the possibility of it being bad anyways but it does make such a thing unlikely.

[edit2] Also bad ram tends to present itself through blue screens and program crashes not.. whatever the hell this is.

I have had 2 systems with issues like this, one had a malfunctioning ram stick and the other had a toasted HDD. I suppose overheating could also be a thing but I assume you ruled that out, but like dalchina I am leaning towards a HW issue :P

I already checked the SMART stats on both drives. If it was the drive replacing it would have fixed the problem.

I moved the old drive from primary to an idle unused slave the only thing I haven't tried regarding the drives is to physically disconnect the old drive completely.

Bah.

Guess thats next on the list.. Im going to try running in PE and see what happens as well.

Didn't mean to double post but laptop touchpads are the bane of my existence. I'm 6'7" so in comparison to the size of my hands they're practically postage stamps.

That is an old board. Are you using IDE or SATA drives? Do you have the right chipset drivers or just the wonky microsoft ones? Are you sure the controller on your motherboard isn't on it's way out?