I'm not a microsoft engineer....the Operating System I worked on is for very large computers and is now defunct.

I'm having a technical issue that happens in Valheim but is not exclusive to it.

This is a 1.5 year old Dell (used to build my own, but that's too much trouble now-a-days) with 8 core processor & 48gb memory; I have a Geforce GTX (something, don't remember....it's not cutting edge, but it's decent....I'll look it up and repost if someone thinks it's important). Windows 10.

Intermittently, my computer begins to lag. The end result is that: the game audio soundtrack begins to skip, drag and cut out; the mouse fails to scroll smoothly at all and jumps all over the place making it difficult to play; video lags and jumps randomly. This even happens at the character-select screen....the game isn't even running. I check Task Manager and nothing is eating an abnormal amount of disk, memory or cpu when this is happening.

To me, this feels like something is downloading and the mouse, audio and video are having disk collision issues with whatever is downloading. I've killed everything that I have control over that might be downloading, but, this has had no effect.

3 months ago my wife said that maybe it's the (logitech) mouse. I said that it didn't FEEL like it was the mouse because it was affecting the audio and video as well....it felt systemic. Well, never one to turn down a new mouse, she ordered me one. When I plugged it in the issue magically fixed itself. 3 months later, same 'new' mouse....and the issue is back. I just don't know any more :-(

I appreciate any help folks can offer. I can't really afford to buy a new mouse every 3 months (oh, and yes, I changed the batteries) :-)

Thanks in advance for any help :-)

Arach