SOLVED Windows 7 random freezes - Potential Solution

[quix]

This is basically rehashing my post from this thread: https://www.w7forums.com/windows-7-freezes-t114p22.html

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READ THIS: There are (at least) 3 different possible causes for the freezing problems experienced by Windows 7 users. This solution is specific to the ones caused by bad system services files. As it takes longer and is more technically involved than both other solutions, it's advisable to try them first.

Considering the proposed solutions to the other 2 problems are easier, you should probably try them first:
1. Make sure you RAM voltage is set correctly according to the RAM manfacturer specification (when you leave the bios to do it automatically it will give it 1.8v by default, which is not enough for modern memory speeds and sizes).
2. Try setting your Power Saving scheme to Performance, and disable all sleep/hibernation/smart power saving features.

If the above 2 methods didn't help, then you should try the following:
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I've been experiencing the same freezes a lot of you guys have been experiencing lately. The machine would simply freeze, mouse wouldn't move, keyboard wouldn't respond, and the only way out is a hard reset.
Then they got worse, and started happening within a minute or two of startup, very consistently.
However, Safe Mode still runs fine, so I figured something that's disabled in Safe Mode is the cause of the freezes.
At least for my machine, this assumption turned out to be correct, and I was able to fix the problem.

Here's my solution:

Step 1: boot into safe mode (if your system didn't just crash, do this by pressing F8 at the windows boot menu).
Step 2: click Start, type msconfig, disable EVERYTHING in both the start up and services tabs. Now reboot into normal mode and see if you still experience freezes. If you do, then this solution will not help you. If, however, the freezes stop, then you've just isolated the cause of the freezes to one of the services of startup items you disabled.
Step 3: run msconfig again (you can do this in normal mode, no need to reboot again), and enable all the startup items first. Now reboot and see if your machine starts freezing again.
Step 3.1: Freezing: if the system does freeze, then the cause is one of those start up processes now enabled. To find out which, disable the second half of the list (if your machine freezes immediately after start up, do this in safe mode), and reboot to normal mode to see if it still freezes. If it does, then the cause is in the list of enabled processes, and if it doesn't, the cause is in the list of disabled processes, so enable/disable a half of the appropriate part of the list, and try again.
Repeat this until you isolate the process that's causing the freezing, and remove the software related to it.
Step 3.2: No Freezing: This means your freezing problem is caused by a system service. Leave the start up processes enabled and continue to step 4.
Step 4: in msconfig go to the services tab, and sort the services alphabetically. Disable the lower half of the list and reboot.
Step 5.1: Freezing after reboot: the freezing is caused by one of the enabled services, so again, sort the list alphabetically and disable half of the enabled services and reboot. Repeat this step, minimizing the list of potential causes until you isolate the faulty service.
Step 5.2: no freezing after reboot: freezing must be caused by one of the disabled processes, so disable the enabled ones, and repeat step 5.1 for the second half of the services list, until you isolate the faulty service.
Step 6: verification: to verify that the faulty service is indeed the cause of your freezes, disable all other services and start up items and reboot your machine with only the faulty service enabled. If it still freezes, congratulations, you've just found the root of your problem.
If it doesn't freeze, then the problem is more complex and probably involves dependencies and concurrent services, and you'd have to use more complex methods to find out what exactly is causing this.
Step 7: fixing the faulty service: This is tricky, as these are all system files.
the first thing you have to do is figure out what files the service runs off of. In my case the service in question was Workstation and it was wksvcc.dll that needed replacing to fix my machine's freezing problem. I stumbled upon the service's .dll file name after many hours searching for a way to fix a corrupt service, so I can't offer any insights into how you might find the correct .dll file for your faulty service.

Now, to fix the service:
After you've tracked down the correct .dll file, locate it in windows explorer, change it's permissions so you can modify the file (do this by opening the properties of the file, and in the security tab's advanced page, first change ownership to yourself, then give yourself permissions to modify the file). Once this is done, you can rename the file to <filename>_CORRUPT.dll. Now, as far as your system is concerned, the file is MIA and the only fix is replacing it with a copy from the repository.
Click Start, type in cmd and right click the icon to run it as Administrator.
In the command prompt window, type sfc /scannow
This will run a system file scan and discover the missing/corrupted file, and then repair it by getting a clean copy from the repository.

Once this is done, go back to Start, type and run services, then find the faulty process and enable it. Restart your machine and see if this fixed your problem.



Hopefully someone can chirp in and include a link to to some comprehensive listing of Windows services and their respective .dll files, as I haven't been able to find such a list so far.
Edit: link to a list of services and their descriptions, thanks to kitesurfa: http://www.blackviper.com/Windows_7/service411.htm#A:
Once you go into a service's page, scroll down to see the .dll files listed in the registry settings (see attached picture for example).

The above solution worked for me, however, since it involves modifying system permissions and files, do this at your own risk.


My system specs are:
Win7 Ultimate 64 bit
Asus P5E-VM HDMI motherboard with ACPI
Intel E8200 C2D 2.66ghz OC to 3.62ghz
4x2gb OCZ Platinum pc2-8500 running at 903mhz
XFX Radeon HD4850
Seagate 250gb SATA2 7200rpm
WD Caviar Black 1TB SATA2 7200 rpm 32mb cache dual proc

The system is a triple boot with windows 7, xp and ubuntu.

 

[Floyd]

Windows 7 freezes

I'm also having a freezing problem. brand new HP desktop. Freezes very often. Reboot only solution. Is there no comments from Microsoft? and no fixes?. I like Windows 7 - fast bootup but this is driving my wife (of 42 years) mad - and me too!

 

[clifford_cooley]

Hi Floyd - Welcome to w7forums

Did you follow the steps in the first post?
If so what where the results?

 

[Floyd]

Several others have suggested changing the power setting. I am trying that first and no freeze in the past hour. Fingers are crossed. Seems to need a bit more Global warming - maybe!

 

[clifford_cooley]

But you posted in this thread, it should be relevant to the first post.

However the main thing is that you fix your freeze issue. Keep us posted and if the power settings don't work. Give the first post in this thread a shot. You never know what may be the issue.

 

[kitesurfa]

Hopefully someone can chirp in and include a link to to some comprehensive listing of Windows services and their respective .dll files, as I haven't been able to find such a list so far.

http://www.BlackViper.com

 

[quix]

http://www.BlackViper.com

Awesome! Thanks!
I'll edit it into the first post.

 

[quix]

Update: it's been 3 weeks since I did this and I've had no freezing since then.
I think 3 weeks is long enough to say that this method actually works.

 

[hesdesda]

hey
I've been having the same problem and tried to fix it "blindly" by fixing the workstation process, but it didn't work. My computer just doesn't seem to follow a pattern while freezing, sometimes I think it's overheating or while watching flash videos, but it's not reproducable or triggerable, therefore disabling the processes the way you suggested would be very time consuming for me (occasionally, my system is running for hours )
Is there any way to find out which process is faulty without following your procedure?

 

[quix]

I can't think of such a way. If we knew how to trigger the freezes then we would have known what's the exact cause...

There are really only two ways to guess this:
1. try everything that worked for others (e.g. workstation and windows update services, so far).
2. Go over each service and try and guess when each one is activate, then rule out the ones which you can be certain have already run.
Or you could try and figure out what type of usage would activate what type of service...

I'm sorry I can't offer any better advice on this. I'll try and think of something in the meantime.

 

[BlogCal]

Dell told me a BIOS patch was coming next week that would fix this issue. Not sure if that is actually possible (not a techie!) but am hopeful because the above suggestion is way beyond my capability!

And, frankly, I'm astounded that Microsoft/Dell/etc do not have a fix for this - obviously wiidespread - problem!

 

[quix]

They were going with the classic ostrich approach to solve this problem (bury your head in the sand and hope the problem goes away). Now that they see that, yet again, they're losing clientelle to linux and apple, hopefully they'll come up with a more appropriate approach to the problem...

I can think of 2 simple solutions:
1. Fix whatever it is that's *corrupting* these files (my guess is windows update, as it's the only thing that would touch them).
2. For computers already plagued by the problem, either do a full sweep and replace all the services` .dll files with undamaged ones (this could actually work quite well), OR write a small program that runs in safemode, loads all the services` .dll files one at a time, carefully logging its progress, and once stuck, you hard reset, and the last file on the list is the one that needs to be replaced (and this can be automated too). The whole process of loading and unloading every service .dll shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes.
A batch script could very possibly be written to execute this process automatically.

Personally, I don't have the time nor the programming prowess to do 2 (who ever said this has to come from M$ anyway?), and 1 can only be done by M$.

Hopefully this does get resolved soon, because W7 is finally an OS worth replacing XP with.

 

[hesdesda]

Quick update - I went through the disabling/enabling process - for me it was (I hope, but I haven't had freezes since then so I assume so) Windows Audio. Went through with the routine and works fine now. I thought about the batch script, too, it shouldn't be too hard to write? At least the logging part, the fixing part could still be done manually.
Maybe someone with batch script abilities could do this? )

 

[quix]

Quick update - I went through the disabling/enabling process - for me it was (I hope, but I haven't had freezes since then so I assume so) Windows Audio. Went through with the routine and works fine now. I thought about the batch script, too, it shouldn't be too hard to write? At least the logging part, the fixing part could still be done manually.
Maybe someone with batch script abilities could do this? )

Out of curiousity, about how long did the whole process take?

 

[hesdesda]

All in all, about 3 days. And I wasn't sure if I had disabled the right processes - in the end I had 7 left over and I just fixed the first one and realized the problem had stopped. Funnily, I still got two more freezes, which were slightly different in nature, but only after hours of using my computer, so I guess it's ok now.

 

[quix]

I'm getting seriously tempted to write a script that just replaces all the system .dlls in the system32 dir.

 

[hesdesda]

Ugh - my freezes started again. -.- I very much hope it's the same problem (however that should have happened), however - if you would write that script I'd gladly be your first user ;o)

 

[quix]

Ugh - my freezes started again. -.- I very much hope it's the same problem (however that should have happened), however - if you would write that script I'd gladly be your first user ;o)

It'll be a week before I can even get to it. I'm flooded with homework and exams right now :\
Even then, I'm not sure I know my way around the windows system well enough to do that.
Ideally I'd just boot into DOS, rename the sys32 dir, then see what happens to windows when you try to run it (try in safe mode first though). My guess is it would automatically create a new sys32 dir with new .dll files for itself.
If that actually works, then once it created a new sys32 dir, you can copy paste the old one over to the new one, selecting NOT TO REPLACE any existing files with the ones from the old directory we renamed.
This can be easily done in a batch script, but the one thing I just don't know how to do is load a batch scripts to run before windows even starts...

I'll play around with this on sunday, and see how windows reacts to different changes to its critical system directory... I do hope this works though

 

[clifford_cooley]

Ideally I'd just boot into DOS, rename the sys32 dir

Windows has a habit of blue screening or entering a continuous reboot cycle when system files have been corrupted or removed. This is not an advisable course of action.

 

[quix]

Windows has a habit of blue screening or entering a continuous reboot cycle when system files have been corrupted or removed. This is not an advisable course of action.

That's why I'm going to test it on my machine first before releasing any sort of script that does something like it.
It may be possible to run the /sfc command from dos with networking though, or something like it.