Freezing/Lag Spikes on HP ProBook (yes I tried the obvious shit)

[FaythNihlus]

G'day TSupport,

Just an issue I'm having with my HP Probook 4330s, recently went out of the country on holiday, previously I rarely used my laptop for anything but coursework, however in the past I've run several modern games without much problem.
I'll be posting the system specs in a moment. The graphics card is intergrated but the computer ran quite well with it's i5 processor. I even played through Mass Effect 2 and 3, with only some moderate lag in heavily rendered moments in the game. However, a few weeks before I left and now the computer has had strange unexplainable lag spikes. The spikes generally occur when I play games, I noticed them first when I was playing X3: Terran Conflict but realized they occur more when the game is Full screen. However sometimes I'd get frequent lag spikes even when in windowed and even while just on the Desktop browsing the internet.
They tend to come and go, a few moments ago while typing this I was getting a second long lag spike every 2-3 seconds, and they seem to be becoming more infrequent. They often occur during cutscenes in games and distort and unsync dialogue and video.
So far I've noticed the lag spikes playing:
- Homeworld 2
- Empire Earth 2
- X3: TC and AP
- Jedi Knight 3
- AoE2:HD
- Advent Rising
- While watching a movie in WMP
- While browsing on Firefox

None of these are particularly graphics heavy applications, so my first impression is that it is not graphics related, as I've mentioned, in the past I've been able to run much higher-end games with little to no trouble.

Another strange thing is that the lag spikes tend to come and go, for example last night I ran X3: Albion Prelude in Windowed mode, got lag spikes for about 10 minutes but played through them because it's not an action-heavy or cutsceney game (it's unbearable to try and play a game of AoE2 with freezes every second) but eventually the freezes stopped and I was able to play (up until the autopilot smeared my Nova like margarine across the side of a jumpgate).
Later I tried running an old game, Alien VS Predator 2, and had no problems at all.

My first reaction was to clear the crap from my computer, so I immediately went spring cleaning on my hard drive removing all useless files, programs and games. I freed up about 150GB from that alone (mostly games and movies), and went on to run CCleaner, and defrag the hard drive, which cleared up more space. However the lag spikes persisted, so I ran a couple of anti-virus/malware programs and removed a couple of infected files, but I'm still getting those spikes. I've also tried disabling unneccessary programs from my taskbar and updating drivers. The only unusual thing I might have noticed is Firefox using 200,000KB in Processes, no other program touches that much usage, but having Firefox closed doesn't help the lag spikes and Firefox can be a pretty unoptimized browser at times.

System Specs:
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601)
HP ProBook 4330s
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2420M CPU @ 2.30GHz (4 CPUs)
8192MB RAM
DirectX Version 11
Intel(R) HD Graphics Family (lastest driver installed) Total approx memory 1696 MB

I've tried to put as much detail into this thread as I can to help any helpful techie figure out whats wrong. I also posted this on a technical support reddit board and only got one response from someone telling me my laptop is a piece of shit (when it's actually pretty decent considering it's not a gaming computer and I got it from a scholarship!) and bitched about the new X-Rebirth game.

Will monitor the thread to give responses to any questions. Thanks!

EDIT: Forgot to mention that when the freeze occurs, the mouse freezes too.

[FaythNihlus]

Just a little bump

[djjkxbox360]

You should run a game in a windows and keep task manager open next to it whilst you're playing, and see if any programs start using a lot of CPU when the lag spikes happen. It could be a program doing some random shit in the background