I'm experiencing random micro-stutters and short freezes in games, where my FPS drops from a steady 165 to 1 for about a second while playing titles like Path of Exile and League of Legends. These stutters seem to perfectly align with spikes in disk activity on my system drive (C:), which is a Lexar NM710 1TB NVMe. Notably, games aren't installed on the system drive, and I've physically disconnected an HDD to avoid conflicts. Despite low disk transfer rates (1-5 MB/s), the active time spikes significantly. Windows has even logged a message about a low virtual memory condition, although I'm using about 18-20 GB of RAM and have sufficient physical memory available. I've tried updating all drivers, modifying power plans, and various settings related to the pagefile, but the issue persists and only started after a fresh install of Windows 11, where everything was fine before. Can anyone help?
4 Answers
It's really important to check the health of all your drives. A failing SSD can cause these disk spikes, even if it's not actively in use. Running some disk tests might reveal issues that aren't immediately apparent from just health status alone.
From what I've seen, this behavior seems somewhat common with Windows 11. If it really gets too annoying, consider switching to another OS; it might be the only thorough fix right now.
Have you checked to see if all your drivers, especially the chipset ones, are fully updated? Also, I recommend leaving the pagefile set to automatic instead of a manual size. That might help with performance issues related to memory usage.
Definitely back up your data before making any changes. Sometimes changes in the BIOS or disk setup can lead to data loss, so better safe than sorry!
Yes, I made sure everything is updated. Thanks for the suggestion!