From what I understand, this has been an issue for a lot of people since 8.3 for those with less powerful PCs. I skipped a fair chunk of this expansion and came back to prep for Shadowlands.
I downloaded an addon which gets rid of the ‘talking head’ pop up boxes which was one of the triggers for these freezes which did help. Other triggers are opening the character screen and the collections tab.
Are there any other fixes I can do, or will I just have to accept these annoyances until I can upgrade my CPU?
Black screens are caused by crashing display drivers, not the CPU.
So make sure your drivers are up to date, or if the problem started with newer drivers, then revert back to the old stable ones.
Also, can you please list your hardware specs?
What are the temperatures of your CPU and GPU while playing?
You can use a tool like HWMonitor or HWinfo to check and also log the temps.
Well if it’s not the drivers , got a bad news your GPU it’s even overheating or giving up on you. Disassemble clean re-paste it put it back on do some stress test. If you have error of 0x00000117…it’s time to cough some cash.