Constant "Not Responding" lag!

I have Win 7 and recently I've been having a problem where programs, especially firefox and windows explorer, but many other programs too, are frequently greying out and showing the spinning disk with a (Not Responding) designation. This was happening so much I could not even type this message out, and since Win 7 seems to be unable to actually terminate processes like XP is so good at, I couldn't terminate any of these processes so after about 5 minutes of this I had to do a hard reset, and I ended up doing 4 hard resets because it kept happening, and i was just trying to write this post.

Then I went into safe mode and it was still happening, so now I am in my XP duel boot and it is nice and functional. I have done a Spybot and Malwarebytes scan with no results. What is going on, why has my computer basically ceased to function in my Win7 installation?



Operating System
Windows 7 Ultimate (x64) Service Pack 1 (build 7601)

Processor
3.20 gigahertz Intel Core i5-3470
128 kilobyte primary memory cache
1024 kilobyte secondary memory cache
6144 kilobyte tertiary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (4 total)
Not hyper-threaded

Board:
Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. H77M-D3H
Bus Clock: 100 megahertz
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. F5 03/29/2012

RAM:
Slot 'ChannelB-DIMM0' has 8192 MB

Display:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 [Display adapter]
Samsung SyncMaster [Monitor] (24.0"vis, s/n YCUYHVDZ702086, July 2010)

Audio:
NVIDIA High Definition Audio
VIA High Definition Audio

 

Sounds like a bad hard drive.

 

Have you recently installed any new software?

It could be a software conflict, this is common if you have two antiviruses with real time protection installed.

 

Seconded. Especially since the same problems exist in safe mode.