Tiny little freezes, juddering?

Asus CG5270 model;
8 gigs of ram
Intel Core 2 Quad, Q8300@ 2.5ghz.
n9400 video card running 8.17.12.5896 drivers. (low power card, no extra power to it)
Win 7 home premium x64 (windows update says Im good for patches and so on)

No RAIDs, no interesting shenanigans, no overclocking, no custom hardware.

it freezes. tiny little freezes, like... a second or two long to start, building to 3 or 4 second long freezes. as its starting to do this, you can hear the CPU fan idle _down_ and running CPU and network monitor widgets shows that the CPU load basically stops and the network activity drops. eventually it'll go for a long freeze, like 10 seconds or so, and then it'll be fine again for another hour. the whole miserable cycle lasts for maybe 40 seconds.

there's no heavy hard drive activity. usually I'm playing a game or watching a movie. back when it was just movies, I assumed it was some sort of codec issue, which I _thought_ Id resolved, but Im still getting these annoying little freezey sessions in games.

Ive tried the things I know how to: Ive updated drivers, Ive gone looking for conflicts, defragged relevant drives, ran malware and viruscheckers to no avail, and booted the system up into a no-BS, no extraneous processes, applications, or services mode and it still happens. Edit to add; dicking with Core assignments doesnt seem to affect it either.

also also; its a selective freeze. animations still play out on screen; god rays are still shining, water animations keep pretending to be water, but it wont take any new input and anything complex (a moving actor, a changing shadow) will be frozen. So Im farily sure its not the graphics _directly_. sound is likewise not an issue, no stuhstuhstuhstuttering of sound in games (although it stuttered right along with movies)

halp?

Do you maintain a large hosts file? If so how big is it/how many entries?

the one in system32/drivers/etc is 1kb and opened up it just says "this is a sample hosts file"

Then that isn't your issue. If the file gets very large, like 10s of thousands of entries it can cause periodic freezes every time the DNS entries are updated.

Next thoughts ...
I wonder if it could be your power settings? Since it is a desktop there is no need for battery conservation. Go to Control Panel \ Power settings and set it to "High Performance".

Also, since you mention the fan speed etc, I would suggest you check the ASUS website and make sure you have the latest BIOS and drivers installed.

Power settings are on High-dont-turn-anything-off, Bios and whatnot is all up to date according to ASUS website. I dont have any screensavers or background programs like Seti@home or anything, and I cant see anything in processes or services thats memory leaking or similar.

Im baffled :/

What Anti-virus are you running?

How long have you had the hardware? Is it new? It could be voltage, memory problems.

You might download process explorer and run it off to the side while you are running other things, then you can watch for CPU spikes at the time of the freezes.

Yep, definitely answer TM's questions here. Anything Norton/AVG/Panda etc...should be removed in safe mode with this tool:

AV Uninstallers - Windows 7 Forums

Then reboot to normal mode and install MSE.

And definitely install this latest ATK0110 driver in my attachment, which ASUS machines are notorious for having older 2005 versions which is a known issue.

Also, Load the Optimized Defaults in the bios and save.

@ TorrentG;

OK, Antivirus was AVG, which is now stripped off, and installed MSE (which I really hope you meant Microsoft Security Essentials, and not something else)

Installed the ATK driver (I think. It flashed up a CMD box and then zip, which I'm assuming means its installed)

switched out the BIOS settings to 'default' : which Im fairly sure it was on already. I don't see an option for 'optimised default' unless I'm missing it in some menu tree.

@ Trainableman;

Hardware is newish. maybe a year old, if that? its all gear that came with the box apart from the graphics card and hard drives.

I'll give process explorer a shot, but monitoring CPU usage with task manager and desktop widgets has so far shown no peaks, just crashing to zero CPU usage for the freezes.

I really appreciate the help; I'm normally the person giving out advice. not being able to figure this out is driving me nutty :/

So how is it going now. Sounds like you did real well since I've last posted.

Hopefully results will match.

Sadly not doing real well at all. followed the above steps to no avail, even went as far as re-imaging the machine. small freezes are now evident outside of applications, usually whilst accessing the file system menus, like if I want to choose where to save something to and hit the drop down or [...] button, applications will hang for a few seconds and may even pop 'not responding' in their title bars, and then miraculously unstick like there was never an issue.

post-reimage the only thing thats really changed is nVidia drivers going to 8.17.12.6099

or situations like now, where I ask it to pop an IE window (usually use chrome, but some sites just barf and insist on IE for their ActiveX drivers whatsits) but yeah. I ask it to pop a new window, and nothing. I can still move things around on the screen without video corruption, windows trails. I can close windows, and programs, and they close. and then 5 seconds later, I get a full system freeze for a second, CPU usage hits zero, and then bam, IE pops open, and everything is running along just fine again.

any other ideas? Feel free to toss me some "are you sure its plugged in" kind of stuff, too. maybe I missed something really stupid. :/

[Edit to add : sorry for the long time responding. work, other stuff. :/]