Don’t defrag a RAID-5, well maybe once a year or something, just like any other drive RAID-5 can get fragmented but due to overhead and parity bits and all the IO processor usage, it really isn’t going to increase things that much
Is your pagefile on your RAID-5, which is a BIG no no
Does the freeze happen after a long idle time?
Everything I have looked at refers to a hybrid sleep/power thing, disabling it in power options seems to have fixed that
I’m not a hardware/driver guru (though I have written a couple multi-monitor video drivers years ago for WinNT) but I do know that when I see someone’s mouse freeze, the first thing I look at is I/O like hard drives, and that’s almost always it. But that’s the great thing about free advice…
You should never have to uninstall the Microsoft USB HID drivers for a USB keyboard and mouse. A fancy driver for a gaming keyboard with macro functions and an LCD display? Sure, why not. But those default usb keyboard & mouse drivers are extremely low-level drivers that have been critical to Windows for ages, and I can say with almost 100% confidence that those are not the root cause of the problem.
The redundancy was the reason for the raid configuration. For normal work the speed is not really a problem, but I would have liked it to be faster.
For safety I do also have an external mirrored HD (NAS) that automatic takes backup of my working directories.
Both mice is connected to usb on the motherboard. I have also disabled the sleep option on usb now (At least I hope I did, the Danish translation of Windows make this kind of stuff difficult).
Usual when Windows stops due to a I/O problem it will affect more than just the mouse, at least in my experience.
I do agree with that, but a reinstall will download new drivers if you ask windows to delete the drivers (Useful if the file is damaged) and redo the registry settings.
And I am a bit desperate with this, it is very annoying that I have to reboot frequently .
Usual I keep track on active tests/reviews by opening a directory window for each device I am testing. This does not work with frequent reboots.
Current status:
Have run CCleaner, it did find a couple of details.
Have disabled usb power down.
Has another usb device active on the same internal hub as the mice, to see if it also freezes.
sfc /scannow scans windows system files to verify their integrity, and fixes ones that are bad. You can use the /verifyonly flag instead of /scannow to have it scan and tell you if there is a problem without fixing it. Maybe it will find something goofy, esp. if you have had any power outages or unexpected shutdowns.
I, too, always had a weird feeling about programs like CCleaner. I did use it once, when I was pressed for time and didn’t really care if it worked or not because the next step would have been reimaging the OS, but it seemed to do a good job at not only fixing things, but telling you what changes it made.
Goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyways: if you haven’t already, take a backup
Also, if push comes to shove and you have to reinstall from scratch, don’t forget to use a license key extractor to make sure you have license keys for all your purchased software. Sometimes, those little slips of paper get lost
edit: I noticed that you were concerned that it may be malware. I, too, run MS Security Essentials, but if I’m suspicious of something, I’ll install Malware Bytes’ Anti-Malware (MBAM) and do a full scan. If it finds nothing, I uninstall MBAM until the next time I want it. 95% of the time, a MBAM QuickScan finds if your system is infected or not, so if you are worried, but not worried enough to spend hours scanning, try a quick scan with MBAM.
Also, the bit about uninstalling the USB drivers and letting windows download and reinstall the drivers, I’ve had that fix a similar problem with a Dell laptop. I wish I could remember what device was acting strange. It was either the built-in touchpad, or that it wouldn’t recognize any USB devices plugged into it.
64 or 32 bit? Recently install windows updates? Try going into your device manager and disabling one mouse. See if the other freezes. There’s a latency program but I forget what it is now. Basically you disable the devices and it shows which ones are lagging your computer.
I had the same problem on my old windows laptop, I use Ubuntu now, if I can find the power cord I’ll turn it on and let you know what I had to shut off. I also had to cancel a windows update file too. It’s been a couple years since I’ve used windows so I can’t remember exactly.
Have you actually tried the mouse in a different USB port yet? Even if you think it’s connected correctly, the port itself might have an intermittent power/data problem, so you need to try a different port.