Lately my PC has been freezing sporadically. Not freezing completely, as I can still move my mouse, videos or music continue playing and window animations still function, but whenever I try to open a new page or folder it doesn't do anything. Sometimes it last for 5 seconds, sometimes for 5 minutes. Then all the actions I tried to do while frozen suddenly happen all at once. It even happens when trying to boot sometimes.
I checked my SSD SMART and it's fine, I performed a RAM health check and it's fine. I don't know how to check if it's my CPU, so it could be that. What can I do?
I know you said that you checked the health of your SSD, but did you use the manufacturer's program to do so? I find SMART tables aren't nearly as accurate for solid state drives as they are for spindle drives.
It's unlikely that it's the CPU. I recommend, if you're able, to grab a copy of Parted Magic and boot into that live environment to see if the issue persists. Any live distro will work but I highly recommend PM since it is packaged for troubleshooting.
I just downloaded Samsung's software but it can't run diagnostics for my SSD (850 EVO). It also says "Good" for Drive Health but I suspect that's SMART as well.
When it happens again open the task manager (might take a while), go to performance and look at your SSD. Is it at 100% disk usage?
I had this problem a few times before and it's annoying as hell. One time it was a Windows Store hiccup where it started to update in the background. One time Windows update. One time Nvidia Broadcast got stuck installing. And a lot of times I tried to play Apex Legends and EAC (Easy AntiCheat) scanned my entire drive for a few minutes..
I've tried a ton of tweaks, but start with the following (use CMD as Admin):
sfc /scannow → Scans for errors, will probably find some and fix them. Run again till no errors come up
chkdsk /f /r C: → Full SSD scan for broken sectors. Will probably ask you to restart, the scan happens after restarting. This fixed a ton of issues with my Windows 11 installation, even though the SSD tests and SMART showed no issues
try having task manager open during a freeze, maybe there's something that spikes the usage for a while?
are there any interesting errors in windows event viewer?
when's the last time you ran a full virus check + Malwarebytes?
you could also try partitioning a drive and installing windows fresh on that, see if it still happens (if the new installation runs fine, you can remove the partition and do a fresh install)