Windows Explorer Not Responding

Hi all, hope for some help. I am running Windows 7 Professional, on a Lenovo ThinkPad (E530) and I'm recently getting some lagging issues.

This machine and OS has always been very quick, but, of late, when working in folders and files, either on an external thumb drive or even with files on my hard drive, I get the blue "waiting" circle, and, up top, it says in brackets "not responding." It's happening when moving back and forth among folders, renaming or deleting a file, or simply navigating in the directory, and also at times when opening an Excel spreadsheet or Word document, or Adobe PDF, or even my Internet browser will freeze and say not responding.

The only recent change I made was related to initiating Windows Backup. I installed some software from Western Digital, for an external hard drive to use for my system image and file back up, which I do manually, once a week. It has seemed that, since installing that software from WD, is when the issues began, so I disabled it at Start Up. I have not tried totally removing it, and perhaps I should.

This freezing issue is not constant, which is also an irritation. All will run smooth and quick at times, and other times the lagging is constant for several minutes, and anything I am trying to do gives me a "not responding" message. I can't seem to pinpoint when or why it will happen with any certainty at all. Seems quite random.

I have run checks for spyware, antivirus, malware, etc, and have found no problems. The disk is not fragmented. I ran scannow and after running a verification process, I got the message, Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity errors.

Then, oddly, the next message was "for your" which seemed bizarre, and when I hit return again, after the C:\Windows\system32>, it said, "your was unexpected at this time" which just seems a weird sentence fragment.

So, I don't know if scannow was successful?

The lag time of "not responding" is not huge -- maybe up to seven to ten seconds, but it slows down my work, of course -- and eventually the program or process unfreezes and I can complete the task, but this new quirk is totally out of character for how my system usually runs, which is very quick and very smooth, so I'm concerned/annoyed and not sure what to do at this point.

Any suggestions would be most welcomed. Thanks in advance.

 

Thanks so much for the reply! Sorry, have been out of town. For now, I uninstalled all Western Digital software, and my laptop is running as before. Also uninstalled some other programs I wasn't using.

I will definitely give your suggestions here a shot, as well, although I'm thinking it was something with the WD software, since the issue seemed to start after that install, and seems cured now that it's removed.

Again, thanks for your response.