I did a reset on my system, should be brand new, Windows 10 Pro and Blender 2.77.
When I start Blender now and do a little work, let’s say a minute or so, Blender freezes and C:/ goes to 100% percent usage (I don’t know the proper English word, sorry, but I hope you’ll know what I mean - I DON’T mean CPU or RAM - both are fine).
I did a lot of trouble shooting - it seems to be only this file, it’s neither Chrome nor Kaspersky, other files with very complex geometry are working. It’s quite big (~2,5GB) because I used a lot of textures, so I don’t have the possibility of uploading it quickly. Any ideas?
The file has:
-Very simple geometry
-A lot of textures
-Some but not many, a little but not very complex shaders
-An audio file linked for playback synchronisation
How big is your hard drive, as it may be maxing out as the files load, and with a project that big and only 8gb of memory it may be trying to spit it off on to the drive and running out of territory. RAM has become fairly cheap, and 16gb is now more the minimum. I just had to move up to 32gb RAM on a project to give myself more play room. If your project spins off to the drive, it will be 10x slower at minimum, perhaps except on a SSD drive, but swapping is always slower. Just my two(2) cents worth??
Sounds like a lot of swapping starts due to lack of RAM. There is more data to be held in memory than you have RAM and os starts to write memory contents to hard drive. This makes everything super slow because reading and writing from/to hdd is much-much slower than RAM. Either get more RAM if possible or get an SSD for swap drive as a slower alternative as paulhart2 also suggested.