Troubleshooting: Boot and desktop lagging

I have a Gigabyte P34 that’s about six years old, running Windows 10. Details on the specs in the first entry of my sig.

Recently, it froze while running an application, and I did a hard shutdown. Upon the boot screen, the windows 10 dots that go in a clockwise circle would pause about every second before going in motion again. So it was like a stutter every second. Computer wouldn’t enter Windows. Curiously too, the SSD LED would also blink about every second and that interval was consistent.

After another few hard shutdowns and reboots, the system booted fine and entered windows. No problems running any programs. Fast forward a few days to tonight...

Upon attempting to put the thing to sleep tonight, same pattern occurred. Froze and I had to do a hard shutdown/reboot. Then again got the stutter upon boot and the consistent blinking SSD LED. Couldn’t get the computer to boot normally this time. I decided to wait it out and eventually it finally did get to the windows login screen. But then the cursor was very laggy and typing my password took several min because of the lag. And then again as the thing was trying to get to the desktop I got the windows 10 spinning dots with their stutter rotation. Got impatient and hard shutdown the system again. Leaving it off for now while I get advice.

Any thoughts on this issue. Is this possibly an SSD hardware issue? The fact that it worked itself out previously and then happened again a few days later has me confused. Any insight is appreciated.

 

So this morning it booted up fine. No stutter and no blinking SSD LED. What the heck?

Is this a software or hardware issue more likely?

Also let me know if this is better posted in a separate forum...I wasn’t seeing a troubleshooting spot.

 

This is the best sub-forum for posting such issues as it would get better exposure rather than being limited to a few Gigabyte/Aorus owners:

Windows OS and Software

On a side note, I don't think it's hardware, probably some buggy Windows update, and yes they have all been buggy recently. Just one example: http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...nd-announcements.826887/page-94#post-11095170

 

Thanks Spartan for the note. Appreciated! Still doing some troubleshooting on this but after updating windows and updating some drivers I haven’t yet experienced this again. I’ll check out the OS forum if I run into this again.