Freezing partially and unresponsive at random intervals...

[prixone]

Hello everyone,

After a few years my computer is now randomly freezing and I ran out of ideas of what could potentially be the issue.

The computer in question is the "Main PC" in the signature below except memory is now 2x8GB, I have done so far:

- run error checking on all my HD's (nothing detected)
- run memtest all passed
- run OCCT no issues
- run prime 95 all passes
- removed a memory stick (still freezing)
- switch memory slots (still freezing)
- PSU is new and over the requirement
- Temporarily removed any overclock to reduce possibilities

Some times it does as soon as a start the PC, some times it just randomly freezes after some time using it.

Ran malwarebytes and rechecked everything running, event logs and the such found nothing out of normal.

For some I still believe this could be either HD or hardware related?!?!?

I simple don't know what else to check and unhappily I don't have an extra motherboard to switch to right now or one available in the closest stores to acquire either

Would love some help of what else I could possible verify


Not sure if worth mentioning but even tough it freezes I can still move the mouse around and the bar of applications at the bottom responds to certain degree but doesn't open anything if I click anything.

 

[EarthDog]

Is the HDD activity light pegged when this happens?

Have you tried reinstalling windows?

 

[prixone]

Do you mean if its blinking against constant light during the freezes?

Honestly, I am trying to avoid having to reinstall if at all possible which is why I'm searching for options lol

 

[EarthDog]

Yes... when it freezes, do you see a lot of HDD activity? When you say freeze does it 'come back' to usable?

What does the OCZ SSD Guru software say about the drive health?

I know you may not want to reinstall, but... it may be the least time consuming in the end to figure out what the issue is. It may be something in Windows, or it may be hardware.

 

[prixone]

when it freezes, do you see a lot of HDD activity?

It keeps blinking during freeze.

When you say freeze does it 'come back' to usable?

yes it comes back to usable

I know you may not want to reinstall, but... it may be the least time consuming in the end to figure out what the issue is. It may be something in Windows, or it may be hardware.

Indeed, but I just don't feel like reinstalling all the applications and stuff it would be main OS and applications since i keep everything else else where but honestly I did like to find what is causing this issue rather then just give it a fresh start of course I might not find it at all but want to give it a try for awhile.

What does the OCZ SSD Guru software say about the drive health?

100% health

 

[prixone]

So I went ahead and replaced the memory with some other memories I had here and magically the freezes were gone, but hey I used prime and memtest to ensure the old pair was good and also checked the mb manual for compatibility list.

Or at least so far it hasn't frozen once, how could that be?

 

[Dlaw]

Could be that one of the modules wasn't inserted fully into the slot, I've had that happen before.

 

[prixone]

Hi Dlaw,

Thanks for answering, I did remove the ram from A1/B1 tp A2/B2 as well and made sure it was well installed and also tried with a single module...

 

[prixone]

So after using it for sometime with the new memory the freezes are back so guess that excludes the memories as being the issue here. Does that mean the motherboard is the root for sure now? Or anything else I could test?

Temperatures never gone above 60 on stress test and normally around 30~45 for CPU and 30~55 for GPU.

Trying to test my GPU now.

UPDATE:

apparently downgrading my video driver seems to have worked for now still testing to see if no freezes will happen, will update later.

UPDATE2:

been running smoothly ever since I downgraded the nvidia driver to version 355.60 from the latest

 

[prixone]

Unhappily I was unable to find the issue so I am resorting to the last option format and start over.

I do however suspect the issue lies within motherboard/cpu, when I downgraded my GPU it did work for awhile without issue like 2 days or so then started freezing again so maybe not GPU? I don't know.

Either way formatting it now

 

[trents]

In addition to running malwarebytes, which is an excellent product, I would have suggested temporarily disabling your everyday antivirus and scanning with 1. AdWCleaner, Hitman Pro and Eset online scanner in that order. Eset, particularly, will often find things that other products miss. What you have described sounds like it could easily be caused by malware taking over your machine. I would also have checked the disk and file system for integrity using an elevated command prompt and these commands: chkdsk /f /r and sfc /scannow.

Keep these suggestions in mind for future reference. Now that you are doing a clean install of the OS you will soon find out if it is a hardware problem or something else.

 

[Dlaw]

I find that the time and energy spent on cleansing a machine of possible malware is better spent backing up important data, and fresh installing Windows. Then, you know for sure that there's no malware, and 9/10 times it takes half as long.

I recommend getting everything you need set up and operational, and then imaging your system drive. That way, if it happens again, all you have to do is copy the image back to the drive, and you won't lose anything.

 

[trents]

Yes, imaging the system drive is an excellent practice. Saved my bacon last week. Without thinking I took the advice of a Microsoft tech on a forum when I was trying to solve a USB 3.0 issue. He said to delete all the USB entries in Device Manager and let Windows reinstall the drivers after rebooting. Well, the problem with that turned out to be that once you get to the Windows 10 splash screen you no longer have keyboard and mouse function and can't login. Fortunately, I had created a drive image one week earlier and with my rescue disk media I was able to rebuild the drive from the image.

But Dlaw, I'm not sure that dispensing with malware scanning/cleaning in favor of a clean install is always the right solution. It certainly is if you have a recent image of the drive but with my customer base I often run into the issue where they do not have a drive image and they do not have the product key or the installation media for expensive installed software like MS Office or even the OS itself. And even if they do, a clean install of Windows with 300+ updates (not to mention the installation of other programs on top of that) takes hours and hours. Unless you have a drive image to work with I do not agree that a clean install is less trouble or takes less time to accomplish than scanning and cleaning malware.

 

[EarthDog]

It isn't always right... but it sure is a lot less time consuming in the majority of cases. If a cleanup in safe mode doesn't do it with my apps of choice, I suggest a reinstall.

When I had 'clients' The first thing I did for them was to image the PC that was built after all updates were applied. I was clear that data was their issue to back up and if things got wonky, I would reimage and they would lose everything on that drive. Not one soul balked at this plan simply because of the cost to keep me there for hours. Most of the time its better to setup your clients using best practices. Share with them a bit of what you know works best and would save them money. I found it was incredibly difficult when I 'owned' the data. So I made sure it wasn't my problem... like most major stores do in the first place. Otherwise, you torture yourself with the time spent.

 

[trents]

ED, that works great if you were the one who built their PC. But what if they bring you and infected one built by someone else and there is no drive image and no installation media for the OS or for other software? This is my world more often than not.

 

[EarthDog]

"I am not responsible for data loss"

"I will try to remove the virus and retain data, however, I charge $XX /hour and there are no guarantees I can do it successfully. If you are good with that, I can begin. Your other option is I give it the old college try for an hour or so, then if it doesn't work, I take another two hours to reinstall the OS and updates. Installation of applications post OS install is up to you or I can do for $XX /hour"

Its about setting the customer up with proper expectations. I couldn't be any happier I got out of menial jobs like this... so much hassle for so little returns. I'm just so past that type of work that it pains me to see people go through the struggles I had and why I left it.

Another problem with computer repair is 'the blind leading the blind'. Unless you know your stuff on hoe to get rid of a virus, and I don't in this capacity so please do not take offense, getting a virus off a PC can be an incredibly daunting task. So if you don't know exactly what you are doing, its actually a disservice to the customer to 'try' IMHO. Take it to Best Buy and have them mess with it. In the end, I refused any and all virus removals that weren't an hour to try, otherwise reinstall.

 

[tachi1247]

I had a very similar issue with my current computer hanging/freezing. I thought I had traced the problem down to a DVD burner that was causing it since it would drop out of windows occasionally. Replaced the drive and everything seemed fine for a few days and then the problem came back. Tried disconnecting the new drive completely and it still happened. It was tough to diagnose because it was intermittent and I couldn't force it to happen. As it turned out, I think the last two SATA ports on my mobo went bad. I had my SSD on one of those ports as well which must have been causing the system to hang. I did some re-arranging of drives and bought a PCIe SATA add-in card so that I didn't have to use the last two ports and I haven't had a single issue in about 18 months now.

 

[prixone]

First of all I would to thank you guys for taking the time to post ideas, suggestion and a bit of your slice of life which remembers of myself in some cases .

All help is deeply appreciated.

My first guess was that the motherboard had gone bad and I was in hope that was not the case because where I live its not only hard to get 1155 socket performance mb but all very expensive due to the market crash in the past 3 years.

Either way, I started by swapping my sata cables and disabling unnecessary running HD's, it didn't work at all

I have also tried swapping the sata slot of my OS didn't seem to work, so I can think that the designed sata from MB to use for OS has gone bad(maybe), I will try the pci sata and if that also doesn't work, I will have exhausted all the options I was thinking of being the cause.

I've never seen the GPU or CPU with high temps, it doesn't seem to fail at bios or when memory testing with dvd so maybe the sata 2 is functional, maybe try that as well.

Well as sad as it sounds with nothing else to test besides the sata I think my mb is gone and sad part is that it isn't even that old.

In addition to running malwarebytes, which is an excellent product, I would have suggested temporarily disabling your everyday antivirus and scanning with 1. AdWCleaner, Hitman Pro and Eset online scanner in that order. Eset, particularly, will often find things that other products miss. What you have described sounds like it could easily be caused by malware taking over your machine. I would also have checked the disk and file system for integrity using an elevated command prompt and these commands: chkdsk /f /r and sfc /scannow.

Keep these suggestions in mind for future reference. Now that you are doing a clean install of the OS you will soon find out if it is a hardware problem or something else.

That was in fact the first thing I looked at, nod32, malwarebytes and a whole lot of other stuff to no avail, in fact that was what I tough the issue was at first because it was freezing in a very strange manner which I haven't seen before, as in letting me use the mouse or still let me click on other stuff and some times occasionally completely freeze but mouse would always be responsive.

I find that the time and energy spent on cleansing a machine of possible malware is better spent backing up important data, and fresh installing Windows. Then, you know for sure that there's no malware, and 9/10 times it takes half as long.

I recommend getting everything you need set up and operational, and then imaging your system drive. That way, if it happens again, all you have to do is copy the image back to the drive, and you won't lose anything.

That's indeed a good point, I should have made an image of it, I never cared for it, because I hardly have this sort of issue and after all these years I've became lazy on re-formating the PC.

I will indeed start doing images when I get it stable again.

I had a very similar issue with my current computer hanging/freezing. I thought I had traced the problem down to a DVD burner that was causing it since it would drop out of windows occasionally. Replaced the drive and everything seemed fine for a few days and then the problem came back. Tried disconnecting the new drive completely and it still happened. It was tough to diagnose because it was intermittent and I couldn't force it to happen. As it turned out, I think the last two SATA ports on my mobo went bad. I had my SSD on one of those ports as well which must have been causing the system to hang. I did some re-arranging of drives and bought a PCIe SATA add-in card so that I didn't have to use the last two ports and I haven't had a single issue in about 18 months now.

I am also thinking its something related to the motherboard sata and I do have some pci or pci-e sata driver which I could try although not the best.

 

[prixone]

Hello everyone,

Wanted to give u guys an update on my issue, well I found the culprit, its nod32 v8, whatever they did to the new version its what causes the freezes to me.

Very happy it was neither the motherboard or anything else the issue as that saves me enough money to finally get my NAS

This is very annoying as I used to love nod32 as being lightweight av for gaming and the such...

Hope there is a solution to it, I am currently searching for it, found they ask u to disable win defender and add win patch but disabling defender did nothing for me trying the patch next.

The version 7 works like a charm so I will keep looking.

 

[Dlaw]

But Dlaw, I'm not sure that dispensing with malware scanning/cleaning in favor of a clean install is always the right solution. It certainly is if you have a recent image of the drive but with my customer base I often run into the issue where they do not have a drive image and they do not have the product key or the installation media for expensive installed software like MS Office or even the OS itself. And even if they do, a clean install of Windows with 300+ updates (not to mention the installation of other programs on top of that) takes hours and hours. Unless you have a drive image to work with I do not agree that a clean install is less trouble or takes less time to accomplish than scanning and cleaning malware.

I know I'm a little late on the reply, but I'd like to point out that if people bought the incredibly expensive Office at a store like Staples or Walmart, and they didn't make sure they put the product key in a very safe place, then what the heck were they thinking? I can't imagine spending that kind of money on software, let alone software that I'm not going to keep under lock and key. And if they bought it on MS store, isn't it accessible through their MS account?

Also, for the updates, yes, they can take a very long time to complete. However, most of the process is or can be completely automated. Thus the actual time spent on the machine is considerably less. My customers understand that if their computer is in a state that can't be corrected within 2 hours, a fresh install is done. Before I take the machine, I instruct them to place anything that they don't want to lose in their personal folders (documents, pictures, etc.), and I back them up before the reinstall. They understand that all of their programs and settings will have to be set up again, and anything they purchased will need to be authenticated again. I haven't run into this yet, but if they have an expensive piece of software installed that they don't have the product key for, I point them towards a free alternative, most of which I already have installed on my machine, and can demonstrate it's functionality. I also generally install AVG, as it's the most user friendly AV I've found and most of my customers have no AV (hence the multitude of viri).