For the past year or so on my old ass laptop (this didn't always happen), I've been getting some random hiccups in games, like the screen will freeze up for a second or so, and the sound will loop for that amount of time until it resolves itself. I don't get any crashes/errors/etc. I'm guessing based on the timing of the hiccups, that it's occurring when new sounds/graphics/whatever are being loaded into memory. The performance outside of the stutters is fine, and it doesn't seem to get worse with heat.

I've tried upgrading/downgrading every driver I can think of, defragmenting, reformatting and reinstalling windows, increasing the page file size to maximum, but to no avail. I tried testing my DPC latency (whatever the fuck that is), and apparently my wlan driver was causing an issue there, but I resolved that, and no effect.

I'm guessing it's a problem with the hard drive, but is there anyway to test this for sure, short of having another hdd to test with? I've tried the hdd diagnostic thing in windows and it just reports no errors. Could a problem with the ram, gpu, or anything else cause this kind of stuttering, with no errors/crashes?

I'm not much of a PC gamer, but here's about how often it occurs with what I've played:

Spoiler: show
old emulators/FFXI/really simple games like braid: never

WoW: Rarely, and I don't think I saw it occur outside of a raid/wintergrasp.

Source games: Occasionally to frequently. Seems like it can just randomly happens whenever events happen/people die/voice clips start/etc.

ePSXe: Frequently

Psychonauts(lol?): Very small hiccups extremely frequently.