Yep that ' s exactly it . Woody is a 40 year old millionaire , why would he come here when that is what he had to deal with ? <| sep |> It ' s funny , the CPU usage is completely normal during the stuttering . Even the memory usage and everything else is completely normal and just looking at the stats you wouldn ' t think anything is wrong . I ' ve spoke to someone from a place a got a bunch of my parts from back when I built the PC and he ran me through some diagnostic tests , some of which you had already suggested . He said that if I had gone through the trouble of reinstalling windowsresetting my PC then the problem was likely not software related but rather hardware related . He had me run some tests for the graphics card , and this next part is kinda unbelievable during the Valley GPU benchmarking test I was getting flawless HD gameplayvideo footage at over 100 FPS while at the same time a YouTube video was suffering from the stuttering problem . It ' s worth mentioning the audio from this benchmark test was really messed up though , same as what happens with the YouTubeiTunes audio . Anyway , the graphics benchmark ruled out my GPU as a problem so then he told me to run the memtest 86 again which is where I ' ve been for the last 3 hours despite me protesting and saying I ran it last night . He then said that once the memtest is done to check my drives using Samsung Magician to SMART test my Samsung SSD . There was no problem there . He then said I should download something called WD Drive Utilities for my HD I ' m assuming because I have a Western Digital HD but that test couldn ' t be carried out because WDDU couldn ' t read my HD . It just displayed the message Attach a supported Hard Drive . This is funny because when I use CrystalDiskInfo to check the HD it says that the status is Good and it apparently has no issue recognising the HD . The tech guy was willing to bet that the HD is the issue and recommended that I unplug the HD for a while to see if it doesn ' t fix the issue . The only problem with that is I can ' t replicate this stuttering problem , and it happens randomly . Even if the HD is the issue I won ' t know because I there ' s no way to properly check . sighAnyway , is it possible that a faulty hard drive could be the cause of this stuttering ? The HD isn ' t what Windows runs off , I ' ve got my SSD for all of that stuff .