Need Pc pro and fraps help/advice?pls?

[cruix]

Hi, recently I got a new PC about 3 months ago, in January I started recording gameplay for YouTube using fraps, now I never really had a problem, Now today I turned on my PC, record one game and start editing, while I am editing my PC started to lag, and then it freezes, I turn it off and on over and over because about every 15 minutes my PC freezes. This is the first time it has happened to me. Now I delete every recording after I have edited  cus of the memory so I don't have 100's of gigs of videos.

Now I have been reading about how fraps using all your harddrive and ram and stuff, I am no pro at PC so Idk  what that means, something about how its better to get ssd or HDD or external/internal hard drive...I really don't understand.

My PC has 4 gigs of ram, and 900 gigs, Gateway windows 7 , I figured that would be enough. Pls help me, I have restored me PC to factory settings but its still to slow and freezes every 15 minutes or if I use it to fast. If you can explain what's happening and what I can do or what I could buy that would be helpful. Pls if you can keep it simple. I literally saved  3 months of money form this PC. I am taking it to a computer store for a check up but since I don't know much about computers I wouldn't know what to ask or what I need.

[DaveLembke]

I'd run memtest86 on this computer to make sure that your ram is healthy. Its free for download and creating a bootable disc or thumb drive.

I own a license of Fraps and while its a really good video cature tool, it is extremely hard drive intensive. The reason behind this is because the data acquired from the video stream can not be compressed on the fly, so it is written to hard drive uncompressed. It also does not take much time to create a 20GB video. Later this video can be encoded in a format such as AVI that is say 700MB in size with some loss of quality, but still good quality for youtube etc.

When using Fraps a lot a while back, I was constantly having to defrag my hard drive as for large files constantly created and deleted was causing fragmentation to happen quickly. I'd check for fragmentation  although Win 7 is pretty good at self managing that, but the freezing of the computer etc sounds like a memory issue possibly and not ruling out hard drive issue possibly if the swap space is running into troubles. You can always get the tool from seagate called seatools if the drive is seagate etc and run diagnostics to make sure its healthy.

Fraps can overwork hard drives if you use it a lot and for long periods of time. I haven't cooked any drives yet with it, but the constant solid HD indicator and chatter of the drive while Fraps is recording really shows the excessive HD use needed to perform a direct dump from video to hard drive of captured information and audio.

I own a 90GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD but I havent tried Fraps with it yet. I have owned fraps for about 3 years now but havent used it in about a year. If I have some time tomorrow I will direct fraps to save to my SSD and create a video and see how it acts, if its a constant lit HD indicator like the 1TB HDD or blinking which would indicate that the SSD could take more abuse maybe in that its faster at handling the information and so the information fead to it is actually bottlenecked in comparison tot he speed of the SSD itself which may be able to handle more requests for read/writes

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

I would also check your computer's temperatures to make sure it isn't overheating.

Stick a house fan next to the computer and see if it lasts longer than 15 minutes.