Yesterday I installed custom content for The Sims 4 and soon afterward noticed that Overwatch would freeze for about a second, then return to normal. The problem kept happening repeatedly. After deleting the game, mods, and its Documents folder, things seemed fine, but the issue returned the next day. Fortnite also had unusually long loading times, skipped the spawn island, and displayed textures that loaded slowly. Restarting the graphics driver, shutting down the PC, and cleaning the fans helped temporarily. There are about 187 GB free out of 442 GB of storage. What could be causing these brief freezes and delayed textures, and how can I fix it?
2 Answers
Your storage doesn’t sound dangerously full, since you still have roughly 187 GB available. That makes critically low disk space less likely, though checking drive health and monitoring CPU, GPU, RAM, and disk usage during a freeze would still help identify the cause.
The custom content probably isn’t directly responsible once the game and its files have been removed. Try disabling overlays from programs such as game launchers or hardware-monitoring tools, then clear the NVIDIA shader cache. You can also open Command Prompt as administrator and run `sfc /scannow` to check for and repair corrupted Windows system files. Restart afterward so the changes take effect.
Thank you! The scan found corrupted files and Windows repaired them. After clearing the shader cache, Fortnite stuttered briefly while rebuilding shaders, but after a few games everything went back to normal.