I recently had a nightmare that ended up being surprisingly simple to fix—and now I’m excited to share my story in case anyone else runs into a similar problem. My PC (running Windows 10) started freezing randomly throughout the day. It wasn’t a complete lockup every time, but periodically the system would lag for several seconds, windows would stutter, and sometimes I’d hear a brief audio glitch before normal operation resumed. I initially thought it was a driver issue caused by the latest Windows update.
I initially followed the usual advice from online forums. I ran the System File Checker (sfc /scannow) and even did a DISM scan, all of which came up clean. I updated all my drivers, including the graphics and audio ones, and even played around with some power settings. I also checked for rogue background processes with the Task Manager—nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I even rolled back Windows updates, convinced that one of those might be the culprit.
After spending hours troubleshooting software settings, I began to wonder if I was missing something more obvious. A quick glance at my USB devices reminded me that I’d recently added a new external audio interface and a couple of other peripherals via a USB hub. As it turns out, the hub I was using couldn’t handle all the connected devices at once. The overload was causing intermittent resource conflicts that manifested as system freezes and audio glitches.
I disconnected the nonessential devices from the hub, plugged them in one by one directly to the PC, and the freezing issues vanished. It was such a relief to find that the culprit wasn’t some ominous system corruption or a broken update—it was just a matter of too many devices tied to one overloaded hub!
My tip to anyone experiencing these random pauses or system glitches is: don’t overlook the hardware, especially your peripherals and any USB hubs. Sometimes the simplest solution isn’t a software fix at all. Check your connections and power supply to any hubs. Isolate devices and see if unplugging one makes a difference before diving into more complex troubleshooting steps. It definitely saved me a lot of time and frustration!
