Hello there fellow geeks !
First, sorry about posting another freezes issues on this board - and my possibly bad english as I'm french, hope you won't hold it against me
Allright then moving on the specs parts :
- The specs
WINDOWS 7 Pro 32
MB : Asus sabertooth x58
Proc : I7-950
Ram : 3x1G - 1333 DDR3 Kingston
GC : Msi Cyclone Nvidia 460GTX
HDD : OCZ Vertex 2 60G SSD
HDD2 : Sata 2 drive, I don't have the specs but it has been removed for all tests and stand not guilty so far.
Power : GX-650W Cooler Master.
Case : Antec Two Hundred
- Disclaimer
If you don't want to read the whole story, go straight to "Newly installed programs history"
Fast resume : Freeze / huge slow on games or youtube video after a few hours (4/6h) of use while the OS worked fine a week ago in same conditions.
- Boring part to provide insight
Now the little story. I've been using win 7 for the past month without any problems on this new computer, a few oddities appart mostly from faulty programs all removed thoroughly. Now this weekend I had a freeze, the first actually and a major one.
Note that I didn't have any issue of that kind only a week ago, everything was working fine even on a straight 18hrs running.
While watching a youtube video (1080p bad idea), everything went unresponsive, the mouse cursor would still work as would the video (I could hear the sound still playing) but I couldn't do any 'new action' - and as I was trying the usuals : Ctrl+Alt+Del, manually closing programs on taskbar, some random blue screen poped very quickly (i think it was about securing data or something but can't be sure really) and finally the computer rebooted.
The HDD light would stay on so the bios wouldn't detect the hard drive anymore and I had to switch the computer off for a few minutes and eventually it would start up as usual.
I'm a tad stubborn so first thing I did when everything went back online was to get back to the specific video, this time in 720p. Well as you guessed, not even 10s later the same freeze and same cycle, but then the hard drive was way slower than usual and with a SSD it's fairly noticeable as it was roughly 4x times slower to boot and start windows. I became reasonable and proceeded to test a few things.
First thing I've tried was to do something else than watching my nemesis video, tried a game instead : fail, same happened.
This time, I waited for the freeze to end and it actually ended 5 minutes later after every software running went haywire and eventually stopped working and closed. I noticed that it wasn't a "freeze" per se but more like a huge slowdown as from time to time I would be able to perform an action : closing a program or opening a new window. And as fast as it came, everything came back to normal.
- Newly installed programs history
Well believe it or not, but to my knowledge the only new software was a game 'black ops' and that was it. Of course it could have been from a previous day but I don't recall installing anything that would change my setup - I'll check up more this evening as I'm at work right now.
- Tested solutions
As this was looking pretty bad, I did the usuals :
- Everything is up to date via windows update
- Registry fix (registry cleaner, went ok)
- chkdsk /r, went ok nothing odd to report
- Temperatures check with speedfan : the AUX was around 50°Celsius / 122° Fahrenheit but it doesn't look that bad to me as everything else was OK, I might be mistaken tho.
- Suspicious process, nothing in sight as the install is pretty new everything showing were expected there.
- Windows backup : deactivated.
- Windows Power management : switched to high performance but didn't help
- Windows Error Reporting : set to auto from manual.
In the device manager, there is an USB port that windows can't find a driver for, I honestly don't know why it wouldn't - and if it's even relevant - but I though it could indicate something. My Logitech G5 mouse use an old driver as the newest are bugged and every once in a while the mouse wouldn't be switched "on" by windows until plug out / plug in, so I might try to update drivers or use legacy mouse just to be sure.
And Finally, the Event Log :
I've been through the whole thing looking for anything around the timeline and nothing came up at the exact time but an event stating a new login has been successfull and permissions set following said login. Appart from this, the event log seemed empty for the whole 5 minutes my computer 'froze / slowed'.
5 minutes before freeze nothing special, a few process started some stopped but nothing triggered an alert or critical event.
- Coming tests and tryouts
So now I'm left with a few things to test out, such as :
- Full drivers update as seen on other threads.
- Flash my Bios if available (my build is around december 20th 2010)
/* DONE TESTING THESE */
- Check if Nvidia drivers from WinUpdate might be faulty (hey I'm desperate here)
- Hotfix from MS to install
- List of installed softwares from the entire week prior to the issue
- More quick fix (tweaking process mostly)
- Tweak Bios on power management
- I tried to watch videos on silverlight instead of flash and it seems to work fine (I think silverlight don't use GC to render video unlike flash so maybe a clue ... or not)
/* END TESTED STUFF */
- Random thoughts
I've spent like 10h on tests and such, and while I'm at the office and unable to test more until at home, I'm wondering about hardware or software issue.
The hard drive still working even on a reboot is quite scary but then again, everything worked fine in the exact same situations such as temperatures, programs (more or less I reckon) or data load. I'd imagine that any hardware issue would have been faster to emerge than an entire month.
- Youtube videos I haven't checked again but Silverlight seems to work (at least for a 45 mins stream) while youtube was a no deal even for a few seconds.
- Using windows on limited things like casual browsing and watching movies seems ok, I don't have a reliable or long timeframe to support this as it was late but that could indicate something with temperatures, I honestly do not know.
Thanks to any one coming this far, I realize this was a long post but I hope that there was enough informations to be of any use. I've used up all my tricks and feel I can't find it on my own and so much threads seems to exist about it so I guess I might have overlooked something dead simple
Regards my fellow geeks !
First, sorry about posting another freezes issues on this board - and my possibly bad english as I'm french, hope you won't hold it against me
Allright then moving on the specs parts :
- The specs
WINDOWS 7 Pro 32
MB : Asus sabertooth x58
Proc : I7-950
Ram : 3x1G - 1333 DDR3 Kingston
GC : Msi Cyclone Nvidia 460GTX
HDD : OCZ Vertex 2 60G SSD
HDD2 : Sata 2 drive, I don't have the specs but it has been removed for all tests and stand not guilty so far.
Power : GX-650W Cooler Master.
Case : Antec Two Hundred
- Disclaimer
If you don't want to read the whole story, go straight to "Newly installed programs history"
Fast resume : Freeze / huge slow on games or youtube video after a few hours (4/6h) of use while the OS worked fine a week ago in same conditions.
- Boring part to provide insight
Now the little story. I've been using win 7 for the past month without any problems on this new computer, a few oddities appart mostly from faulty programs all removed thoroughly. Now this weekend I had a freeze, the first actually and a major one.
Note that I didn't have any issue of that kind only a week ago, everything was working fine even on a straight 18hrs running.
While watching a youtube video (1080p bad idea), everything went unresponsive, the mouse cursor would still work as would the video (I could hear the sound still playing) but I couldn't do any 'new action' - and as I was trying the usuals : Ctrl+Alt+Del, manually closing programs on taskbar, some random blue screen poped very quickly (i think it was about securing data or something but can't be sure really) and finally the computer rebooted.
The HDD light would stay on so the bios wouldn't detect the hard drive anymore and I had to switch the computer off for a few minutes and eventually it would start up as usual.
I'm a tad stubborn so first thing I did when everything went back online was to get back to the specific video, this time in 720p. Well as you guessed, not even 10s later the same freeze and same cycle, but then the hard drive was way slower than usual and with a SSD it's fairly noticeable as it was roughly 4x times slower to boot and start windows. I became reasonable and proceeded to test a few things.
First thing I've tried was to do something else than watching my nemesis video, tried a game instead : fail, same happened.
This time, I waited for the freeze to end and it actually ended 5 minutes later after every software running went haywire and eventually stopped working and closed. I noticed that it wasn't a "freeze" per se but more like a huge slowdown as from time to time I would be able to perform an action : closing a program or opening a new window. And as fast as it came, everything came back to normal.
- Newly installed programs history
Well believe it or not, but to my knowledge the only new software was a game 'black ops' and that was it. Of course it could have been from a previous day but I don't recall installing anything that would change my setup - I'll check up more this evening as I'm at work right now.
- Tested solutions
As this was looking pretty bad, I did the usuals :
- Everything is up to date via windows update
- Registry fix (registry cleaner, went ok)
- chkdsk /r, went ok nothing odd to report
- Temperatures check with speedfan : the AUX was around 50°Celsius / 122° Fahrenheit but it doesn't look that bad to me as everything else was OK, I might be mistaken tho.
- Suspicious process, nothing in sight as the install is pretty new everything showing were expected there.
- Windows backup : deactivated.
- Windows Power management : switched to high performance but didn't help
- Windows Error Reporting : set to auto from manual.
In the device manager, there is an USB port that windows can't find a driver for, I honestly don't know why it wouldn't - and if it's even relevant - but I though it could indicate something. My Logitech G5 mouse use an old driver as the newest are bugged and every once in a while the mouse wouldn't be switched "on" by windows until plug out / plug in, so I might try to update drivers or use legacy mouse just to be sure.
And Finally, the Event Log :
I've been through the whole thing looking for anything around the timeline and nothing came up at the exact time but an event stating a new login has been successfull and permissions set following said login. Appart from this, the event log seemed empty for the whole 5 minutes my computer 'froze / slowed'.
5 minutes before freeze nothing special, a few process started some stopped but nothing triggered an alert or critical event.
- Coming tests and tryouts
So now I'm left with a few things to test out, such as :
- Full drivers update as seen on other threads.
- Flash my Bios if available (my build is around december 20th 2010)
/* DONE TESTING THESE */
- Check if Nvidia drivers from WinUpdate might be faulty (hey I'm desperate here)
- Hotfix from MS to install
- List of installed softwares from the entire week prior to the issue
- More quick fix (tweaking process mostly)
- Tweak Bios on power management
- I tried to watch videos on silverlight instead of flash and it seems to work fine (I think silverlight don't use GC to render video unlike flash so maybe a clue ... or not)
/* END TESTED STUFF */
- Random thoughts
I've spent like 10h on tests and such, and while I'm at the office and unable to test more until at home, I'm wondering about hardware or software issue.
The hard drive still working even on a reboot is quite scary but then again, everything worked fine in the exact same situations such as temperatures, programs (more or less I reckon) or data load. I'd imagine that any hardware issue would have been faster to emerge than an entire month.
- Youtube videos I haven't checked again but Silverlight seems to work (at least for a 45 mins stream) while youtube was a no deal even for a few seconds.
- Using windows on limited things like casual browsing and watching movies seems ok, I don't have a reliable or long timeframe to support this as it was late but that could indicate something with temperatures, I honestly do not know.
Thanks to any one coming this far, I realize this was a long post but I hope that there was enough informations to be of any use. I've used up all my tricks and feel I can't find it on my own and so much threads seems to exist about it so I guess I might have overlooked something dead simple
Regards my fellow geeks !
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