Acer Nitro 5 AN515-53 Freezing/Stuttering when doing ANYTHING

Hi all,
I have had my refurbished laptop for over a year now and noticed freezing/stuttering on applications and for windows in general. This especially happens when doing literally anything, such as opening a new tab, opening an application and pressing any GUI on a website, the computer will freeze for around 5 seconds and then continue the process. The freezing is MUCH more severe when doing any downloads or updates.

I have noticed this stutter ever since the beginning of using the laptop, but it has been extremely irritating to me now.

I have done many things such as checking sfc and DISM for errors, optimizing windows settings such as turning off hints, cleaning up my system, turning off automatic updates, defragmenting my hard drive, and finally when I had problems updating windows I did a complete repair install. I have cleaned my fans, repasted my laptop, undervolted it, everything, my computer shows no problems in terms of health and functionality but there is always freezing/stuttering.

Is this simply a hardware problem with refurbished laptops or is this just how the nitro 5 is?

Accepted answers

sri369

ShangWang said:

sri369 said:

How much RAM do you have? If you have windows 10 and 8 GB, up it to 16.
Check your hard disk health.
I have a Nitro 5 AN515-42, refurb, over a year and half old, and still zippy as new.

I don't think having 8GB is the cause of stuttering, my hard disk sometimes goes to 100% but I think that's normal.

No, hard disk going to 100% is not normal, and a possible reason for stuttering.

There is something called paging that happens (you can google that for more detailed explanation), and when paging happens excessively due to data swapping between RAM and hard disk, it does cause lag/stutter. And this becomes especially true when you have a normal hard disk and not an SSD for your page file.

Windows 10 as it takes up close to 4GB or more for itself, based on number of background services and tasks, and if you load another program that takes up memory, you are out of luck there and will be hit with swapping. And you mentioned your disk goes to 100% making this argument all the more valid.

BIOS being outdated does not cause stutter out of the blue, unless you had a bad BIOS.

sri369

ShangWang said:

Just making sure you don't think it will cause any incomplete update if I shutdown instead of restarting?

If fast boot is turned off, its the same either approach.

All comments

ShangWang

sri369 said:

ShangWang said:

Henrik_ said:

Never heard of a BIOS that make the computer stutter.

Have you tried and disable the internal Intel(?) graphics card and only run with the Nvidia card? Pagefile looks good?

I have only one HDD, and in the past I set my page filing to 400-12000 with 8GB. I read on a forum that this is the best setting when I was playing GTA.

Games of the past are different from games of today.
Setting a large page file will only add to your agony - with all the page swaps.
Instead of nailing the problem, you are trying to hit around it here, and these will not work in your case.

I have a 16 GB RAM and 6 GB page file. No game I saw, including demanding ones, stuttered. Also, I am using SSD for windows drive and for playing games.

The least you can do is add an SSD and allocate swap on that. This is still patchwork since we are not increasing RAM, but since it is SSD now and not HDD, you might get better performance.

I do not have the money to buy anything for my laptop, if I were to continue using what I have, what is the best setting for page filing?
Will disabling c-states do anything for stuttering?

ShangWang

sri369 said:

ShangWang said:

Henrik_ said:

Never heard of a BIOS that make the computer stutter.

Have you tried and disable the internal Intel(?) graphics card and only run with the Nvidia card? Pagefile looks good?

I have only one HDD, and in the past I set my page filing to 400-12000 with 8GB. I read on a forum that this is the best setting when I was playing GTA.

Games of the past are different from games of today.
Setting a large page file will only add to your agony - with all the page swaps.
Instead of nailing the problem, you are trying to hit around it here, and these will not work in your case.

I have a 16 GB RAM and 6 GB page file. No game I saw, including demanding ones, stuttered. Also, I am using SSD for windows drive and for playing games.

The least you can do is add an SSD and allocate swap on that. This is still patchwork since we are not increasing RAM, but since it is SSD now and not HDD, you might get better performance.

I do not have the money to buy anything for my laptop, at the moment I am trying to tweak things to the best of my ability.
What initial and max size do you recommend for 8GB and do you think disabling c-state could help with stuttering?

sri369

ShangWang said:

I do not have the money to buy anything for my laptop, at the moment I am trying to tweak things to the best of my ability.
What initial and max size do you recommend for 8GB and do you think disabling c-state could help with stuttering?

I do not mean to tell you to buy, i was merely stating the problem area. I am not sure of what this c-state is that you are talking about. I only try to do non intrusive settings changes.

Set your swap at min 8, max 12 GB (1.5 times RAM).

Also, reduce your game resolution from 1920x1080 to 1600x900 and lower graphic settings - this should help some.

ShangWang

sri369 said:

ShangWang said:

I do not have the money to buy anything for my laptop, at the moment I am trying to tweak things to the best of my ability.
What initial and max size do you recommend for 8GB and do you think disabling c-state could help with stuttering?

I do not mean to tell you to buy, i was merely stating the problem area. I am not sure of what this c-state is that you are talking about. I only try to do non intrusive settings changes.

Set your swap at min 8, max 12 GB (1.5 times RAM).

Also, reduce your game resolution from 1920x1080 to 1600x900 and lower graphic settings - this should help some.

C-state is related to the BIOS settings, you can change CPU cores to save power at idle or to work all the time.

sri369

ShangWang said:

sri369 said:

ShangWang said:

I do not have the money to buy anything for my laptop, at the moment I am trying to tweak things to the best of my ability.
What initial and max size do you recommend for 8GB and do you think disabling c-state could help with stuttering?

I do not mean to tell you to buy, i was merely stating the problem area. I am not sure of what this c-state is that you are talking about. I only try to do non intrusive settings changes.

Set your swap at min 8, max 12 GB (1.5 times RAM).

Also, reduce your game resolution from 1920x1080 to 1600x900 and lower graphic settings - this should help some.

C-state is related to the BIOS settings, you can change CPU cores to save power at idle or to work all the time.

I do not bother about those. I used park control and updated my power plan so my CPUs are sleeping until they are needed. For almost all my work - light to medium, like baout 90% of time, atleast some of my cores are sleeping at all times.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6029997/uploads/editor/yz/ijnf20ocw8g3.png

ShangWang

sri369 said:

ShangWang said:

sri369 said:

ShangWang said:

I do not have the money to buy anything for my laptop, at the moment I am trying to tweak things to the best of my ability.
What initial and max size do you recommend for 8GB and do you think disabling c-state could help with stuttering?

I do not mean to tell you to buy, i was merely stating the problem area. I am not sure of what this c-state is that you are talking about. I only try to do non intrusive settings changes.

Set your swap at min 8, max 12 GB (1.5 times RAM).

Also, reduce your game resolution from 1920x1080 to 1600x900 and lower graphic settings - this should help some.

C-state is related to the BIOS settings, you can change CPU cores to save power at idle or to work all the time.

I do not bother about those. I used park control and updated my power plan so my CPUs are sleeping until they are needed. For almost all my work - light to medium, like baout 90% of time, atleast some of my cores are sleeping at all times.

Thank you for sharing, I simply use QuickCPU to unpark all my cores to 100& and leave everything there. Do you recommend I get ParkControl along with QuickCPU or am I pretty much fine?

sri369

ShangWang said:

Thank you for sharing, I simply use QuickCPU to unpark all my cores to 100& and leave everything there. Do you recommend I get ParkControl along with QuickCPU or am I pretty much fine?

I do not know much about QuickCPU (never used it). I use ParkControl and ThrottleStop together.

On a side note, looks like QuickCPU took features from both ParkControl and ThrottleStop. And added a few more options. Be careful when tuning with it, it seems pretty powerful at the first glance on its website.

ShangWang

sri369 said:

ShangWang said:

Thank you for sharing, I simply use QuickCPU to unpark all my cores to 100& and leave everything there. Do you recommend I get ParkControl along with QuickCPU or am I pretty much fine?

I do not know much about QuickCPU (never used it). I use ParkControl and ThrottleStop together.

On a side note, looks like QuickCPU took features from both ParkControl and ThrottleStop. And added a few more options. Be careful when tuning with it, it seems pretty powerful at the first glance on its website.

I see, I also ran chkdsk /c by curiosity if I actually have a corrupt disk, and I ended up getting something like this:

Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure ...

1027328 file records processed.

File verification completed.

Phase duration (File record verification): 1.10 minutes.

File record segment 4645 is an orphan.

File record segment 4649 is an orphan.

File record segment 464E is an orphan.

File record segment 4651 is an orphan.

8504 large file records processed.

Phase duration (Orphan file record recovery): 0.00 milliseconds.

Errors found. CHKDSK cannot continue in read-only mode.

I think it is unlikely fixing my HDD with CHKDSK will resolve the 100% error, but if I wanted to make sure I make the most out of a CHKDSK repair in one restart should I do chkdsk C:/f /r /x ? Might it be as effective to get a software that fixes hard drives?

sri369

try running chkdsk in safe mode command prompt

ShangWang

sri369 said:

try running chkdsk in safe mode command prompt

Sure will do but since I'm repairing with chkdsk it won't matter I believe.
As for page filing I don't think I need to set it so high, since I rarely run out of ram but I have plenty of HDD space left.
Do you think it might be better for me to set the min and max the same lower at around 4GB?
Also when sometimes it prompts me for a restart when I lower the page filing, do I have to restart or can I just shutdown and open my computer
the next day?

ShangWang

sri369 said:

try running chkdsk in safe mode command prompt

I don't have fast startup enabled, so I'm assuming I can shutdown and then open my computer again to successfully make changes to virtual memory right?
I just don't want to go through the process of restarting my computer for a small change like virtual memory.

sri369

ShangWang said:
As for page filing I don't think I need to set it so high, since I rarely run out of ram but I have plenty of HDD space left.

ShangWang said:

I don't think having 8GB is the cause of stuttering, my hard disk sometimes goes to 100% but I think that's normal.

You contradict yourself (above two statements do not go together).
And with 8 GB RAM, how can you say you do not run out of RAM. Even with just firefox/chrome with a bunch of plugins, memory goes over 6 GB, let alone games. What you think you don't run out of RAM is your system writing to page file giving a false sense of RAM not being used fully.

The below screenshots are from my laptop with 16 GB RAM. Now if I opened the same browser in a windows 10 virtual machine with just 4 GB RAM, it would still work, but page a lot. But since it works out SSD, it doesn't show the lag.

Look at the browser memory usage at about 1.5 GB.

Open task manager, select memory tab, and take a screenshot while playing whatever game you say causes stutter. Make sure you capture after playing for some time.

Look at memory usage (also hard disk usage). This is how your disks should be while playing. The below screenshots are from the game RUST that literally writes and reads every moment, along with communicating heavily with server.

And, after seeing all these screenshots, you still feel your system is all good and your RAM usage is good, HDD is fast enough and has no errors or issues, and want to address system stutter, sorry sir, but I am out of here. Your system will stutter until your address the core issues - HDD to SSD and RAM upgrade. Or stop using software that use more RAM.

And if you are facing issues when doing ANYTHING that is not memory intensive, it points to hard disk issue.

Before

While playing

After playing

ShangWang

sri369 said:

ShangWang said:
As for page filing I don't think I need to set it so high, since I rarely run out of ram but I have plenty of HDD space left.

ShangWang said:

I don't think having 8GB is the cause of stuttering, my hard disk sometimes goes to 100% but I think that's normal.

You contradict yourself (above two statements do not go together).
And with 8 GB RAM, how can you say you do not run out of RAM. Even with just firefox/chrome with a bunch of plugins, memory goes over 6 GB, let alone games. What you think you don't run out of RAM is your system writing to page file giving a false sense of RAM not being used fully.

The below screenshots are from my laptop with 16 GB RAM. Now if I opened the same browser in a windows 10 virtual machine with just 4 GB RAM, it would still work, but page a lot. But since it works out SSD, it doesn't show the lag.

Look at the browser memory usage at about 1.5 GB.

Open task manager, select memory tab, and take a screenshot while playing whatever game you say causes stutter. Make sure you capture after playing for some time.

Look at memory usage (also hard disk usage). This is how your disks should be while playing. The below screenshots are from the game RUST that literally writes and reads every moment, along with communicating heavily with server.

And, after seeing all these screenshots, you still feel your system is all good and your RAM usage is good, HDD is fast enough and has no errors or issues, and want to address system stutter, sorry sir, but I am out of here. Your system will stutter until your address the core issues - HDD to SSD and RAM upgrade. Or stop using software that use more RAM.

And if you are facing issues when doing ANYTHING that is not memory intensive, it points to hard disk issue.

Before

While playing

After playing

I rarely play games but when I do for some games it does stutter and you are correct, SSD and more RAM are definitely what is needed to prevent it.
The real problem I'm facing is stuttering when doing anything like scrolling at random times, and I think that a HDD with errors is the culprit.

When using Microsoft edge here is my memory:

With that being said do I just run chkdsk C:/f /r /x restart and hope for the best?

Also do you know if it matters that I restart my computer after making virtual memory changes or can I just shutdown and start up?
I was also wondering if it makes a difference if you set the max and min the same.

sri369

ShangWang said:

I rarely play games but when I do for some games it does stutter and you are correct, SSD and more RAM are definitely what is needed to prevent it.
The real problem I'm facing is stuttering when doing anything like scrolling at random times, and I think that a HDD with errors is the culprit.
When using Microsoft edge here is my memory:

With that being said do I just run chkdsk C:/f /r /x restart and hope for the best?
Also do you know if it matters that I restart my computer after making virtual memory changes or can I just shutdown and start up?
I was also wondering if it makes a difference if you set the max and min the same.

You can set both the same. And restart after virtual memory changes. Try turning hardware acceleration on or off and see if that helps.

ShangWang

sri369 said:

ShangWang said:

I rarely play games but when I do for some games it does stutter and you are correct, SSD and more RAM are definitely what is needed to prevent it.
The real problem I'm facing is stuttering when doing anything like scrolling at random times, and I think that a HDD with errors is the culprit.
When using Microsoft edge here is my memory:

With that being said do I just run chkdsk C:/f /r /x restart and hope for the best?
Also do you know if it matters that I restart my computer after making virtual memory changes or can I just shutdown and start up?
I was also wondering if it makes a difference if you set the max and min the same.

You can set both the same. And restart after virtual memory changes. Try turning hardware acceleration on or off and see if that helps.

My GPU GTX 1050 should be better than my i5 8300H CPU, so I don't think hardware acceleration for my browser would affect it, the freezing just occurs at random times it gets a new task or performs differently on startup.

Also I read online that disabling fast startup removes the kernel and allows for a "reboot" on startup, so wouldn't shutdown and restart have the same affect in that case?

sri369

ShangWang said:

My GPU GTX 1050 should be better than my i5 8300H CPU, so I don't think hardware acceleration for my browser would affect it, the freezing just occurs at random times it gets a new task or performs differently on startup.

Also I read online that disabling fast startup removes the kernel and allows for a "reboot" on startup, so wouldn't shutdown and restart have the same affect in that case?

I posted this in one of my very early windows 10 threads - disable fast startup - without it shutdown never really shuts system down, it only puts it into stateless hibernate mode.

ShangWang

sri369 said:

ShangWang said:

My GPU GTX 1050 should be better than my i5 8300H CPU, so I don't think hardware acceleration for my browser would affect it, the freezing just occurs at random times it gets a new task or performs differently on startup.

Also I read online that disabling fast startup removes the kernel and allows for a "reboot" on startup, so wouldn't shutdown and restart have the same affect in that case?

I posted this in one of my very early windows 10 threads - disable fast startup - without it shutdown never really shuts system down, it only puts it into stateless hibernate mode.

Yes, thank you but my question was if a complete shutdown will do the same thing as a restart so I won't have to restart and just shutdown and start my computer again to make changes when prompted for a restart.

sri369

ShangWang said:

sri369 said:

ShangWang said:

My GPU GTX 1050 should be better than my i5 8300H CPU, so I don't think hardware acceleration for my browser would affect it, the freezing just occurs at random times it gets a new task or performs differently on startup.

Also I read online that disabling fast startup removes the kernel and allows for a "reboot" on startup, so wouldn't shutdown and restart have the same affect in that case?

I posted this in one of my very early windows 10 threads - disable fast startup - without it shutdown never really shuts system down, it only puts it into stateless hibernate mode.

Yes, thank you but my question was if a complete shutdown will do the same thing as a restart so I won't have to restart and just shutdown and start my computer again to make changes when prompted for a restart.

Yes......

ShangWang

sri369 said:

ShangWang said:

sri369 said:

ShangWang said:

My GPU GTX 1050 should be better than my i5 8300H CPU, so I don't think hardware acceleration for my browser would affect it, the freezing just occurs at random times it gets a new task or performs differently on startup.

Also I read online that disabling fast startup removes the kernel and allows for a "reboot" on startup, so wouldn't shutdown and restart have the same affect in that case?

I posted this in one of my very early windows 10 threads - disable fast startup - without it shutdown never really shuts system down, it only puts it into stateless hibernate mode.

Yes, thank you but my question was if a complete shutdown will do the same thing as a restart so I won't have to restart and just shutdown and start my computer again to make changes when prompted for a restart.

Yes......

Okay, sorry. It's just that for applications such as avast antivirus it asks to restart after an update instead of shutting down and starting up again so I wasn't sure if I could successfully make changes even with fast boot disabled.

ShangWang

sri369 said:

ShangWang said:

sri369 said:

ShangWang said:

My GPU GTX 1050 should be better than my i5 8300H CPU, so I don't think hardware acceleration for my browser would affect it, the freezing just occurs at random times it gets a new task or performs differently on startup.

Also I read online that disabling fast startup removes the kernel and allows for a "reboot" on startup, so wouldn't shutdown and restart have the same affect in that case?

I posted this in one of my very early windows 10 threads - disable fast startup - without it shutdown never really shuts system down, it only puts it into stateless hibernate mode.

Yes, thank you but my question was if a complete shutdown will do the same thing as a restart so I won't have to restart and just shutdown and start my computer again to make changes when prompted for a restart.

Yes......

Just making sure you don't think it will cause any incomplete update if I shutdown instead of restarting?

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