I have a fairly beefy machine:

• Intel Q9450
• 8GB DDR2800 (4x2)
• Intel X25-M G2 80GB SSD
• Several other hard drives
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64

In the last month I've gotten a mysterious slowdown problem.

When I start my IDE (IntelliJ IDEA) it usually takes about 20 seconds on the SSD. If my machine has been on for a day or two (as far as I can tell this is the only pattern) and I try to start the IDE, it brings my machine to a halt. CPU usage goes up to 25% per core (so it's basically 100% usage) and it takes up to 5 minutes to start.

Other things I've noticed: iTunes will start to skip and stutter (my music is running off a second hard drive).

The only persistent things I'm running are:

• AVG Anti-Virus
• Spybot (the slowdown predates this)
• Hamachi and Murmur (again the slowdown predates this)
• Apple Airport Base Agent
• HP OfficeJet 8500 driver/manager

The browser I use is Chrome. I can't think why that'd be relevant but it's always on so I thought I'd mention it.

When this happens I can't see a reason for it in the process list. No CPU hogs. No spikes in IO activity that I can see. Basically I'm at a loss to explain it and need to reboot, at which point everything returns to normal (for awhile).

FWIW the Intel SSD is about 75-80% full. I know being too full can really degrade performance. I don't believe that's the issue here.

Does anyone have any ideas on what I can do to fix this or at least help find what's going wrong? This same machine (sans SSD) could run Win XP and stay up fine for a month or two.