Windows 10: W10 grinding to a halt (dosbox)

Hi, fairly new W10 install based on W7 upgrade.

Stock drivers for everything.

While playing computer games recently (particularly DOSBOX ones) I experience that the system simply grinds to a halt after a certain time.

Even trying to get a Task Manager/Process Manager running (ctrl-alt-del) then takes ages and nothing will close and I can only reboot the system.

There is no hard disk activity during that time. Memory is always around 2G (50% of 4G in use).

During this "system slowdown" any sound that is still playing in the computer game is then also "fragmented" or "slowmotioned" (the hagging, intermittend sound). Almost as if it is caused by audio.

I have no clue what this could be. Also during these slowdowns usually from what I can see there is no high CPU consumption.

I believe also sometimes after a while it restores itself, ie. some YouTube video playing in a browser will resume playing normally without all the delays and hickups.

Simply crawls to a halt. Do you people have any idea what this might be? And how to diagnose it, if in any case?

Currently I'm having to reset (reboot) this laptop time and time again. I did install a few audio tools / enhancers like "DFX" and another one (that I just removed) but I don't think this is related to those installs (?). I'm seriously... I believe I have no errors like this (the dragging of the computer and the audio) unless I'm playing a DOSBOX game.

And every DOSBOX game has it (those from GOG.com).

:)

 

Laptop grinding to a halt

It doesn't seem like I can get access to the menu you're referring to I'm afraid. I followed your instructions but holding down F11 when powering does nothing- I just get the VAIO splash screen followed by the BSOD. The same is true with all of the function
buttons as I tried them for good measure, both holding them down and tapping them.

 

Laptop grinding to a halt

Thanks for persisting with me. I tried the USB in my desktop PC and the media does indeed load ok, so there seems to be no problem with that.

I've also tried to follow the illustrated steps in the clean install guide but am having trouble here. On my laptop I access the BIOS screen via a VAIO assist screen. From this screen I can choose to boot from the USB (resulting in the aforementioned BSOD)
or can enter the BIOS screen. In the BIOS there is a 'boot mode' option that has always been set to UEFI, but I don't seem able to actually choose the USB drive as shown in the first illustration of the clean install guide. I can only enable 'external device
boot'. When I do this and exit the BIOS screen, it apparently tries to boot from the USB, but this again results in the BSOD.