Other Weird lag upon loading applications/anything

So the other day I was playing Skyrim and I ran into a situation where the game was playing fine in the outdoor environments, indoor, anywhere. Then as I was exiting a dungeon into the world map (which I had just been on without issue) my game slammed down to about 1-2 FPS. Maybe even <1 FPS as spots. I turned around and went back into the area I came out of and I was instantly back up to >60FPS. Keep in mind that I was running around on the world map for many hours beforehand with absolutely smooth gameplay.

At first I figured it was just a memory leak or something like that so I restarted the game and it was playing fine until it started happening again, but only momentarily. When I would enter a new area be it indoors, in a city, or on the world map, I get a few seconds of incredible lag, then everything catches up and it goes back to normal. This has been happening over the course of the last couple of days.

Now it's started to do it during gameplay. Everything will be fine, but then it would lag up on me for a second or two, then go back to normal. It's doing this somewhat frequently.

I assumed it just had something to do with the game. Going on 30 hours with BF3 and I haven't seen a lick of this issue.

Then it started happening in windows. When I open Google Chrome it's as if the window is popping up in slooooow motion, when it's opening and when it's closing. Same thing with folders now too. When I click on the "My Computer" shortcut on my task bar the folder very slowly edges into existence, works perfectly fine when it's loaded, and then sloooowly disappears when I close it.

The only other background applications I have running are Steam and MagicISO, which I always run. Nothing else other than the standard windows stuff.

Anyone know where I can even start to look for what's causing this?

Edit: I should mention that my CPU and RAM usage are totally normal during this. 0% CPU when idle and maybe spikes to 20% tops when loading and about 1.25GB of RAM usage out of 4GB. And I'm not currently running any OC on my CPU or videocard.

 

have you checked the temperatures of the system when these happen?

Run a virus scan?

 

Virus scan is A-OK. I haven't been following the temps but I'll make sure to watch my GPU temp next time this starts up.

 

Be an idea to run DPC Latency Checker to see if you get any spikes.

 

Thanks for the tip. I ran the program and got spikes. The program is telling me there are device drivers that are behaving badly. Hmmm.

 

I think this is a known issue with Skyrim right now. Happens on my system from time to time too, just let it pass.