Unexplained freezing

[saladin]

http://thereifixedit.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/129199568455484800.jpg

Windows 7 keeps freezing up on me at the moment, but I've no idea what's causing it. It's happened when the system has been idle and during actual use as well. As far as I can tell, Windows is still running because I still get sound through the soundcard. The computer literally stops responding to mouse and keyboard controls, and never recovers. I have to reboot every time.

I have no idea how to even find out what's going wrong. I'm using all current drivers, and this install is only about a month old (fresh install when I got a new hard drive). I checked windows event viewer and there's nothing showing up there.

Has anyone had a similar problem/know a way to diagnose the problem properly? I hope it's not the hard drive, because sending them back is always a pain in the ass.

[Korin]

I used to have that happen VERY often on my old laptop using Vista and very occasionally on Ubuntu.
It's happened twice on my new laptop when using 7, and not once on Ubuntu.
I'm fairly certain it was due to overheating, so mayhaps that's an issue?

[To0]

This happens to my machine also. I traced the issue back to windows being a gay bag. No really. For some reason there are IO commits that take an age (writeing to your HDD) and windows locks everything while this happens. In general the pointer works and just about everything you do is checked by windows so when it unfreezes it closes all the windows and a bunch of other stuff. I'm fairly sure this is a low level kernel issue that affects only those IO transfers that happen in the background. Trouble is I've not managed to fix it. In the short term:

clean your computer - this will sort loose wires and overheating due to dust.

clean your registry and streamline your bootup so useless crap doesn't run needlessly in the background

if that doesn't sort it install something that will let you check the SMART values on your HDD(s) and see if you have any warnings or fail to commit.

Turn on background logging, windows can capture just about everything ever that happens to your machine and running traces on IO, cpu load, memory use etc can let you check to see if anything usual happened when the freeze occurred. (in my instance it was always the search index background task that threw errors.

[neogramps]

For the HDD testing peter suggests - use HDTune (http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe) - will let you see your SMART status (may need to enable it in bios if nothing displays), and will run a disc check for bad clusters etc.

In terms of troubleshooting, I'd suggest you make yourself a ubuntu live cd and play on that for a while and see if your system still locks up - which will tell you whether is's sw or hw

[To0]

In terms of troubleshooting, I'd suggest you make yourself a ubuntu live cd and play on that for a while and see if your system still locks up - which will tell you whether is's sw or hw

I wouldn't. To know that your system is working right you have to be familiar with it. Chances are ubuntu would work flawlessly regardless as (I'm guessing) sally hasn't or rarely uses *nix based OS's so will be limited to pretty simple surfing and media playing. If those things were causing overheating then games would make the computer fall over very quickly. Switching to a dual boot install of XP might be an idea as at least you know how that should run but is more hassle than it is worth.

If you know *nix and can use it then switching to it for a quick check would do no harm but the issue might be a hardware specific issue in windows only.

[brialzebub]

I blame
http://thechaly.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/mr-freeze.jpg

Let's kick some ice!

[neogramps]

It's happened when the system has been idle

He doesn't need to be punishing the system then does he? Web and video should be enough stress - and *nix might just give hime some errors which Windows never will

[saladin]

I've never been playing games when it's happened. It's either been when I've been using chrome or when the computer's been idling while I was using my 360 (the 360 sound comes through the PC's soundcard). It has yet to happen when I've been watching a tv show or something.

[Fil2eFly]

You clearly dont give it enough love.