Windows 7 freezes

[jordeangjelovik]

Hi guys,
unfortunately i have the same problem with my win and PC!
This is my PC configuration:
OS version 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.1
1.MS ASROK N68 ENFORCE 630+680I AM3 DDR2 1066
2.CPU AMD SEMPRON LE 2.7GHZ L3 CASH 1MB L2 CASH AM3
3.RAM 4GB BUFFALO DDR2 800
4.WD 500GB

It is not the best but for the last seven months since i bought my PC with Win 7 x64 Ultimate i did not have problems at all!
and my PC worked smooth and very fast, and i could not even believe that the new win 7 does not even fragment or slow down during the time!
basically i spend time surfing on net and as a photographer i use several programs for photo editing!
before two weeks for the last seven months and using the same programs did not have any problems!
since i started having this issue first i believed that i had virus, then HD issues and then i formatted my windows partition and did clean install and after few days again windows was freezing and the last time i asked one friend of mine for help (he runs PC store)
he told me there are Viruses that attacks the bios and the AV software can't do much about it (of course he told that he fixed the Bios system and my PC, but did not tell me how)!

and after 3 days, tonight again i have the same issue with my PC frozen since 1 hour ago in the middle of my work and as a result i am very pissed!

i am not a computer expert but i believe that this is not a virus or some software conflict with the Windows 7( if that was the reason, i should have this problem before).
Maybe some issue with win updates from sometime ago!?

in this thread, someone posted that we should try with power plan, i tried and it did not work!
Sorry for such a long reply but i hope this could help somehow to locate the problem and help me to fix my PC and everybody else!

good luck to us

in addition!
my PC gave me error message that recovered from unexpected shutdown and this is the error log or problem!!!
Additional information about the problem:
BCCode: f4
BCP1: 0000000000000003
BCP2: FFFFFA8006CE7B30
BCP3: FFFFFA8006CE7E10
BCP4: FFFFF80002B985D0
OS Version: 6_1_7600
Service Pack: 0_0
Product: 256_1

 

[TorrentG]

in addition!
my PC gave me error message that recovered from unexpected shutdown and this is the error log or problem!!!
Additional information about the problem:
BCCode: f4
BCP1: 0000000000000003
BCP2: FFFFFA8006CE7B30
BCP3: FFFFFA8006CE7E10
BCP4: FFFFF80002B985D0
OS Version: 6_1_7600
Service Pack: 0_0
Product: 256_1

Please see the sticky thread in the BSOD section of the forum about how to get help with that.

 

[jordeangjelovik]

thanks Torrent,
like i said i am non an expert but now with your help and little tip i am assuming that i have BSOD problem and i did not even know that this is shortcut of Blue screen of death!
that exactly what was happening with me!
i red your sticky post and looks kinda complicated to me but i hope i will manage somehow to do something or at least to ask for your help !
many thanks and i will look for you there!
cheers,

 

[TorrentG]

Yep, you're welcome. There are quite a few things you need to do and I've posted about them in your thread.

 

[existme]

Hi, first of all thanks to many people who tried to explain their problems here and as a result we could summarize somehow what are the different symptoms and triggers of the problems.
I finally managed to solve the problem of my pc and I registered just to report my solution.

• After reading all the posts from this thread and googling on the net I couldn’t find an exact method to prevent such freezings. I tried all methods: switching to high performance profile, changing ram settings, reinstalling windows several times under different conditions, changing ram modules, uninstalling my antivirus which is Kaspersky, updating my drivers and even downgrading drivers and …
• Let me explain my story: at first I had an AMD Phenome with an HD4800 series display card + a G15 and G5 logitech keyboard and mouse. The system was working perfectly for about 9 month till I updated my graphic card and of course let some windows updates to happen. The freezing started and I tried anything to stop them, unfortunately lack of correct logs when the freezing happened led me to nowhere and I was just messing around with no success. Finally I gave up and I thought maybe something went wrong with my hardware. Because I needed to work on a stable system, I changed my components. I switched to an I7 920 and a GA-X58AUD3R motherboard. I kept my keyboard, mouse and display card and my power. Everything went smooth till the freezing again came from nowhere. I was desperate and suspected to malware or viruses but never find anything interesting in this category.

• As I said before, I tried anything with no success however I found some common triggers and I found some exact methods to reproduce the freezing. For example:

[FONT=&quot]o [/FONT](exact) Starting media player classic with certain video files gave me freezing. First I overcome it by disabling onboard sound card and after I found that it came randomly on different conditions, I overcome it by installing Shark Codecs. (and disabling a service) (I think that it was because of sending a network request at the start of play back by mpc)
[FONT=&quot]o [/FONT](random) Starting some internet related programs gave me most freezings but they were random. Most problematic programs where Google Chrome and ooVoo.
[FONT=&quot]o [/FONT](exact) Finally, I found an exact method which always cause freezing: opening outlook2010 -> Account settings -> datafiles -> add..
and selecting my computer definitely gave me a freezing within 2 or 3 seconds.
​

Solution: After finding an exact trigger I got sure that the problem is related to network. Because when I unplugged my lan cable all problems went away. So, I started to try different lan cards and switching to wireless and those didn’t help! when I was connected freezings happen again. Here I got sure that it is protocol related. I started to disable a bunch of services which were started by Network Service account. I found out that disabling all of these services together will prevent the freezing:
HomeGroup Provider, TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper, HomeGroup Listener, WLAN AutoConfig, Workstation
I should add that quix solution gave me the best idea, but disabling Workstation alone didn’t help me to get rid of freezings. I totally agree with the solution which he gave to solve the problem completely by rolling back the corrupted services but since I don’t need my home network now I am just happy that after a week my computer didn’t freeze a single time. Finally I believe that it is related to windows update because I didn’t had this issues for a long time and suddenly it comes from nowhere even on a brand new computer.
thank you all and specially you quix

 

[TorrentG]

Not a good idea at all to disable the TCP/IP NetBIOS helper if you want your machine to be able to share with any other on the network.

Going by the fact that all of those services are networking with the exception of one, all you needed to do was to update your networking drivers instead, from the manufacturer's website.

And uninstall any 3rd party firewall which may be causing issues.

 

[existme]

As I said before I updated all of my drivers and I am sure that it's not related to drivers because I tried different cards; moreover, my previous system was working flawless before the freezes start. Also I did uninstall my firewall and antivirus software which wasn't helpful.

 

[TorrentG]

My point is that you don't repair Windows by disabling its services. You can tweak Windows like that, but its not a valid repair method.

A valid repair method is to get to the root cause and solve it.

If someone else comes along and didn't see my post after yours, they would be left wondering why their machines can not share across their local lan, when done.

 

[existme]

Yes you are right, I am tweaking windows. Since I don't need to share anything in my home network I didn't try to solve it ( actually I think probably if some one finds out that with disabling these services the freezes would stop, he can use quix method to solve the problem without disabling these services. )

 

[mdiddy]

please instruct me what to do via pm or here is fine, i have tried to pm but it wont let me.

since attempting to type this message my pc has frooze 4 times

first off, i upgraded win xp to 7 32 bit ultimate and have had trouble since

this is my 4th clean install and the problems keep happening. i got the blue screen yesterday dont know what it read because it didnt stay on long

everything is current on drivers according to device manager

i have p4 3.0ghz
1gb ram
ecs r400-a motherboard with on board ati graphics

anything else we need to know please let me know

thank you very much

 

[mdiddy]

another syntop is it messes with my keyboard, it types extra letters i do not press and sometimes holds oone of them down

i can't take much more of this please work with me

thanks

 

[ts263oh]

skipping the system details, what I've read I don't think thats the problem. When I first looked for a solution to my freezing problem everyone simply states the obvious. What else is happening? In my case there was still activity on the screen, I could move the mouse pointer around but I could not click on anything, opening task manager showed that the CPU's spiked to 25% then dropped to 2%, closed TM and the problem went away for awhile. Had the problem right out of the box with this laptop. If this sounds like your problem too then you might look at the mouse/drivers. I bought a new wireless mouse 2 weeks ago for the micro reciever, my old wireless was 4 years old. I've been trouble free since. Hope this helps somebody.

 

[mdiddy]

when mine locks up i cant do anything. cant move the mouse and the keyboard loses all function

also internet explorer and firefox when i had it installed would continuallay crash but when this happens i still can re open it and have function

typically i will be using web browser when the entire system locks up and i can not do anything

 

[TorrentG]

i got the blue screen yesterday dont know what it read because it didnt stay on long

Please see the sticky thread in the bsod section for how to post the crash dumps.
Then make a new thread with the info.

I'll take a look and show you what to do to fix it.

 

[honestmonkey]

Here is my fix - sleep times problem

Sorry if this has been suggested before, but this is a long thread and I didn't read the whole thing. I was getting freezes, and I think they've gone away now. The cause seems to be the sleep times for the computer and the hard drives were different. I had changed the computer sleep time to 60 minutes. However, the hard drive sleep time is somewhere else and I didn't see it at first. It was set to 20 minutes. So the hard drives would shut down, then later the computer would . I think this was causing the problem. I figured this out, changed the HD sleep to 61 minutes. Now there are no freezes and it even responds better coming awake after shut-downs. This may not fix everyone's problem, but it's something to check.

 

[FrankO]

Some more info: the problem HAS to be Win 7

At last! A forum in which people are describing exactly my problem very precisely. (Yet there's no apparent solution after 48 pages of exchanges!!)

After several months of enjoying smooth, fast operation with Windows 7, I started getting the temporary freeze-ups. I can move the cursor freely but nothing I click on responds, and it takes up to one or two minutes before normal activity is restored. What I have to offer here (I confess I don't have the time to read all 48 pages, but 1, 2, 46-48 give a pretty good gist) is some evidence that the problem is unlikely to be related to hardware.

A couple of months after my freezes started I decided to upgrade my machine so I can run Adobe CS5 software at its best. I changed the CPU to an intel dual-core, the motherboard (to an Asrock P43ME) and the GPU (to Nvidia Quadro FX3800). I reinstalled Windows 7 and ensured I had all up-to-date drivers. Even with all that new hardware exactly the same freezing problem returned. It seems to me the scientific conclusion has to lie somewhere with the way Windows 7 behaves.

I found a Microsoft hotfix for Windows 7 freezes (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2265716) but (a) the symptom described at this URL seems to be a complete freeze and (b) I tried to run the hotfix but got an error message so abandoned this approach. I have minimized my configuartion, defragmented my hard drives, bought and run RegCure, all without success.

Candidly, I think there is a serious and fundamental problem with Windows 7. If you look at the massive number of hits when you Google 'Windows 7 freezes' or 'Windows 7 slow' it's obvious there is a huge constituency of people who are experiencing these problems without any clear solution. The freezing is frustrating, time-wasting and — at root — unacceptable in something that is sold for use by non-savvy computer owners. If somewhere in these 48 forum pages there is a solution that truly works, is it possible to create a master link to the solution?

 

[TorrentG]

Your hard drive is probably messed up. Or you have AVG. (Same difference, lol.)

Hundreds of millions of pcs have Windows 7. Of course there are going to be users with problems. None are them are from the OS itself.

 

[FrankO]

Not a very helpful response!

Your hard drive is probably messed up. Or you have AVG. (Same difference, lol.)

Hundreds of millions of pcs have Windows 7. Of course there are going to be users with problems. None are them are from the OS itself.

You're the first person I've ever heard declare a Windows OS to be perfect. But on reflection, I realize you're right. If the systems sold by Microsoft ever had flaws they'd have to come out with things updates and service packs, and neither has ever been needed (lol).

Win 7 sales are around 90 million; they don't yet top one 100 million, never mind 100s of millions.

My hard drives have been scanned and checked by Windows disk checker and by third-party software. I run (paid for) Avira Antivirus.

Yep, some users will have problems. To imply that they're the customer's fault is neither helpful nor necessarily accurate. If you bought a car and it kept stalling, how would you react if someone told you "your clutch is probably messed up"?

 

[TrainableMan]

There are several items I have read or experienced that can drastically effect the speed/performance of Windows 7 and I will list them as items to consider.

Your anti-virus software. An active anti-virus software is a necessary evil that is often just quite evil. The truth is, to detect anti-viruses the anti-virus program has to behave like one - it tries to force itself into every operation you do before anything else is allowed to run, this includes your boot-up, the services, harddrive and flashdrive accesses, and browser calls. Try removing your anti-virus software and see if your problem persists; I would say over the months I have been on this forum this is the #1 cause of numerous problems from slow-downs to BSODs. If this eliminates your problem then this forum recommends using Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) as your frontline active defense.

The size of your hosts file. I found this to be a huge problem for me but if you are unfamiliar with the hosts file then it likely is not the cause of your problem. Essentially the hosts file is a hard-coded look-up table for DNS addresses which is checked prior to passing the url to your dns server. My hosts file has over 10,000 entries, designed to redirect calls to known advertising sites and malware back to my computer instead, and although I consider it extremely useful, it would cause my computer to come to a crawl about every 15 minutes when the windows dns svchost would update. You can detect this issue by using process explorer and seeing one svchost hit your CPU at 50% or better every 15 minutes or so and if you right-click the svchost and select properties you will see it includes the DNS service. The solution that worked for me was a freeware utility HostsMan, which was recommended by member etelmar and now I recommend as well. It removed duplicates, sorted and organized the file and I no longer have the slow-down.

Hardware problems. The third issue I experienced was that my usb trackball would stop tracking and I blamed it on system lag but could not see any process utilizing CPU with process explorer. I even tried buying and using a usb to PS/2 adapter but the problem persisted. By chance I was messing with my system sounds and I set a sound to device connect and disconnect and I started hearing the sounds repeatedly while using my trackball. It turned out there was a short in my trackball cable and it was loosing connection. I cut about 6 inches off my wire and re-soldered it and my issue was solved. Not a software problem at all, just my can't-live-without-it 15 year old trackball.

The point is, your issue may sound the same but be caused by many different things and so you basically need to try everything one by one and knock out the possibilities until you find one that works for you. And when you do find a solution, if it isn't listed here already then please add it to the list for others to try.

 

[TorrentG]

You're the first person I've ever heard declare a Windows OS to be perfect. But on reflection, I realize you're right. If the systems sold by Microsoft ever had flaws they'd have to come out with things updates and service packs, and neither has ever been needed (lol).

Win 7 sales are around 90 million; they don't yet top one 100 million, never mind 100s of millions.

My hard drives have been scanned and checked by Windows disk checker and by third-party software. I run (paid for) Avira Antivirus.

Yep, some users will have problems. To imply that they're the customer's fault is neither helpful nor necessarily accurate. If you bought a car and it kept stalling, how would you react if someone told you "your clutch is probably messed up"?

With all due respect, I've analyzed 10s of thousands of crash dumps (amongst every type of help request you could ever imagine) of Windows 7. I've yet to ever see a fault with the OS and I know its internals and inner-workings to a very high degree.

The OS does not cause freezes or crashes. (Neither does MSE, the only antivirus that will never do so under any circumstances.) Drivers or faulty hardware do. Please take that advice because if you think it's the OS, you'll be stuck with the problem for a very long time. Just trying to help ya out man.

Windows 7 was the most widely used beta of any MS software ever, worldwide. Possibly most of any software, ever. It's testing platform was enormous and all bugs of that nature have long been gone before even beta 7000 was made public.